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The perfect fly rod . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

It's not the sort of thing a person should bring up in polite company. Like politics and religion, if the people involved have any concern, interest - passion - for the subject, it can only end badly. Those of you who know me know that I rarely hang out in polite company. You will, as likely as not, find me with a group of friends heatedly discussing matters like politics, religion and the perfect fly rod.

There. I've said it and there's no turning back. The perfect fly rod. I know half a dozen fly fishermen who will instantly group together, hackles raised, in defense of a beautiful anachronism - split bamboo. I know a hundred others who will immediately jump all over them.

"So, tell me, bamboo rod kook, do you still ride a horse to work?"

Big laughs from the graphite rod aficionados as the cane rod lovers wrap themselves in the warm glow of moral superiority. "Yes, I guess if you don't know how to cast, a graphite rod will hide your ineptness, and if you don't have a soul you'll never notice how cold and hard that crappy piece of plastic is in your hands."

On it goes, into the night - the lone moderate perhaps suggesting there's a place for each, but he is quickly shouted down.

The history of fishing rods is as intricate and complex as any other sort of history, especially so for the buff. I used to hang out with railroad history buffs (it was a job requirement, I was working my way through grad school at a small press that specialized in railroad history). I well remember asking a simple question of the author of a book we were publishing, "What's an articulated locomotive?" The book in question was Articulated Locomotives of North America, Volume I. The author in question was Robert A. LeMessena, a railroad history maven if ever there was one. Another question came immediately to mind but I kept it to myself. "This subject is going to require more than one volume?" (Afraid so. We ended up publishing two volumes of over 400 pages each.)

There were a number of railroad buffs in the room. Immediately, they all began to answer the question - with hugely different answers. Soon they forgot I was there, that the question had been asked in utter ignorance and innocence. Just before I left I glanced back and saw them writhing on the floor, squeezing each other in headlocks, pulling hair and loudly shrieking about the unbelievable stupidity of all the others.

Split bamboo. Fiberglass. Graphite. I'm almost sorry I brought it up.

Until the invention of the modern split cane fly rod (usually credited to Samuel Phillipe, a Pennsylvanian who came up with the idea in 1846), fly rods pretty much sucked. Mostly, they consisted of solid pieces of wood, often spliced together with thread or twine. They were long, heavy, droopy and pretty much worthless as casting instruments. After Phillipe and the split cane rod (a work of imagination, skill, talent and art perhaps only a little less lofty than the Sistine Chapel) the engineers got involved, seeking to perfect what many believed had already been perfected.

We had tubular steel rods, solid fiberglass rods, and finally, hollow tubular fiberglass rods. Synthetic fibers multiplied in the aerospace industry like cockroaches in New York City, and they eventually found their way into strong, light fabrics that were used, along with increasingly sophisticated resins, to make strong, light things (like airplanes and tennis rackets). Rod designers finally got around to trying them out as rod making materials. Early in this process, one manufacturer tried something called Boron. When I first saw the word (young as I was, and powerfully influenced by a great American literary tradition - comic books), I though it must be some sort of alien material that came to earth with Superman from Krypton. Perhaps Boron would prove to be the antidote for Kryptonite. Or sloppy casting. Alas, Boron proved, initially, to be too heavy and unresponsive. Who knew that 35 years later, Boron would be added to graphite rods and called new?

So here we sit. Arguing.

And here I sit, with a corner of my office obscured by rod tubes and Cordura rod cases, filled with rods of all description and materials. Well, not all materials. I haven't gone back to steel or solid wood. I have rods made of graphite, rods made of fiberglass, rods made of split bamboo. And my favorite? I have no favorite. Well, that's not exactly true.

Not too long ago my son and his family were visiting. What better, than to pack the whole caboodle up into the rig with a picnic lunch, some gear, and go fish a high mountain stream? Debbie packed the lunch. Daniel and Erica packed the girls, Sophia and Julia. Papa (that's me) packed the fishing gear. (I mean, why not, he's the professional?)

In went the lunch. In went the family. In went the fly boxes, and snips, and leader wallet. If you're listening carefully, you'll notice one word not yet spoken - rods. In went no rods. But of course, nobody asked because, well, Papa is a professional.

Several hours worth of bumpy, dusty, hot are we there yet? roads later, we got out to go fishing and discovered (once again) that Papa is an idiot. Not one to give up easily, I took a hunting knife and with it managed to gnaw a pretty good branch off a willow. I whittled and scraped until it was free of twigs and large bumps. Onto that willowy willow branch I tied about five feet of leader, a dry fly - and off of the dry fly, on a couple more feet of leader, a bead-head nymph. Off into the stream, my son waded. Off behind him trudged my granddaughters, clinging to dangling bits of shirt as if they were lifelines. And on the bank I sat as my son, surrounded by his children, yanked a brookie from a clear run on a clean stream in my favorite mountains.

The next time you pass a banquet room at a fly fishing convention or fundraiser, and you see a pile of grappling fly fishing buffs wrestling on the carpet, listen carefully. You'll likely hear someone screaming GRAPHITE! Another, wailing BAMBOO! There, at the bottom of the pile, buried by the others will by a gray-haired grandfather insisting, "A nice length of willow branch knowingly wielded by your own grown child to the squealing delight of his granddaughters."

The perfect fly rod.

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans, and San Juan River Chronicle.