ON TEST
FLADEN MAXXIMUS MICROWAVE
Fladen
Maxximus MicroWave (10g-35g)
Barney Wright took out the brandnew Fladen spinning/plugging rod for a cast around… ore and more sea anglers are turning towards the lighter side of sea angling. I have to admit that I’m still a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to sea fishing, and beachcasting will always be my main passion. But, over the last decade or so, my armoury has developed well with an array of rods for casting plugs and lures, and I frequently go armed with just this tackle to winkle out bass, pollack, wrasse, mullet and the like. I know my way around a beachcaster but am no expert when it comes to lure rods. However, there’s a basic principle of design that all rods follow, and, in my experience, action is everything. The nanotechnology used in the construction of
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these Fladen blanks is quite remarkable, and they’re very thin, light and incredibly strong. I’ve used the Nano range for a while now and was intrigued to find out if rods of more than two pieces would be just as good. The MicroWave blank comes in three sections and is so called because it incorporates the ‘modern’ MicroWave butt guide. How this works is that the butt ring has an inner ring (pictured) that brings the line down from wide coils off the reel very abruptly, and then it can pass through all the other rings with next to no friction. Also, the rings can be smaller, which means that they’re lighter, which in turn means that the finished blank is lighter and this improves the action of the blank. It was
many years ago when my hero and good friend Dave Docwra said to me that rings quite often ruin a perfectly good blank! Very true words indeed. Now, I’ve highlighted the word ‘modern’ simply because the technology of this principle isn’t actually new; it is, in fact, many years old. I’ve seen old cane rods in a museum that have big brass butt rings that taper down like a funnel to create the same effect, albeit
they won’t be as effective as the modern-day versions, or indeed as light! So, my test saw me at a few venues where I tried just about everything I could, using mono lines and braids, and from casting the lightest lure to the maximum stated on the blank. Initially I tried mono of around 15lb breaking strain, and, to be honest, it didn’t really work. Even the micro guide struggled to let the line pass completely
Blasting out lures in the lower-weight range was no problem.
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p062-063_TSF_07_On Test.indd 1
22/05/2015 15:13