In my introductory post I mentioned that it has taken me 50 years to learn how to make a modern bamboo fly rod. How can anything take 50 years to learn? It can take 50 years to learn anything if you had no idea what you were trying to learn it. When I started fly fishing 50 years ago I did not know that 50 years later I would be making bamboo fly rods. The only reason I even learned how to fly fish is that I wanted to fish for Atlantic salmon and the only legal way to fish for Atlantic salmon (at least in North America) is to fly fish for them.
My first fly rod was a Fenwick 8' 8 weight 2 piece fiberglass rod. When you only have one fly rod you really have no way to know how good or bad it is. I knew that all the good salmon fishermen had Fenwick rods--Bartlett, Lippy, Sam Ward, Doc Pason, and Robert Scott. The only thing that is important about a fly rod to a 15 year old is that you have a cool one and the cool one is the one that the really good fly fishermen used. You don't want to look foolish on the river casting with something that's not cool. The Fenwick was very cool. Way cooler than my dad's Orvis Battenkill. That's what I thought then -- now I think that Battenkill is way cooler than those old glass "clunks."
Clunk is a term I learned from my father. A "clunk" is a crude, heavey, not well balanced fly rod or shotgun. A clunk is a Mossberg but the slim finely made, well balanced LC Smith is not. He didn't have a term for the opposite of clunk. Well made, nicely balanced, beautiful, tight fitting, finely crafted ... just really nice and usually these really nice things are expensive. I don't know where I got my bias towards really nice things, probably my mother, at least as far as the expensive part goes but my father has an appreciation for old school master craftsmanship. It's always better to save your money and buy one really good thing than to own a bunch of junk.
"Understated elegance," comes to mind. Meaning it's not about being showy -- it's not about impressing others (at least not openly), it's about the feeling you get from owning something that is the very best in terms of functionality and beauty. This is about form following function. A finely made, well balanced side by side shotgun is at the top of the head when it comes to bird guns. It's at the top of the heap because it serves the purpose better than any other type of shotgun. It is light enough that you can easily carry it all day and it will still come up quickly to shoulder. It will swing easily on a fleeting grouse and points naturally to the exact spot that you are looking at. It is quiet in the woods, no rattles, no loose parts. It opens easily when you need to safely cross over a stonewall. No need to eject a shell. It opens so perfectly that the barrels when open still catch and retain the two live rounds in their chambers. Open with just a tad more force and you can extract those shells easily.
A handcrafted custom made bamboo fly rod is the embodiment of understated elegance in the fly fishing world. The highest level, state of the art, the crème de la crème of fishing if fly fishing and the pinnacle instrument in the art for fly fishing is the light weight, finely made, well balanced, beautifully finished, artfully embellished bamboo fly rod. Starting with the fiberglass Fenwick, evolving into lighter and lighter graphite, and finally refining, distilling, and extracting the very finest elements of the sport, you naturally and logically end up with this ultimate precision instrument.
How is a "modern bamboo" fly rod better than a vintage bamboo fly rod? It is different only in the technology used to create it. In the area of adhesives science and technology has given us some of the strongest adhesives ever made. The old hide glues have been replaced by polyvinyl acetates and epoxy resins, shellac and varnish have been replaced by the far superior impregnation process, and cotton thread has been replaced by kevlar. And the treatment of the bamboo itself is more advanced and is still improving through scientific research. The improvements come more slowly as you reach the point of diminishing returns.
I will cover rod action and casting techniques that are required in the proper use of these highly refined, very light weight and shorter fly rods in another post.
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