John Gierach - Fishing Bamboo: An Anglers Passion for the Traditional Fly Rod

Lyons Press is an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

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Text copyright 1997, 2014 by John Gierach

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ISBN 978-1-4930-0743-1 (hardcover)

eISBN 978-1-4930-1555-9 (eBook)

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When you love something, you have the capacity to bore everyone about why it doesnt matter why.

John Irving

Books by John Gierach

Signs of Life

Flyfishing the High Country

Trout Bum

The View from Rat Lake

Fly Fishing Small Streams

Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing

Where the Trout Are All as Long as Your Leg

Even Brook Trout Get the Blues

Dances with Trout

Another Lousy Day in Paradise

Standing in a River Waving a Stick

Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders

Good Flies

At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman

Still Life with Brook Trout

Fools Paradise

No Shortage of Good Days

All Fishermen Are Liars

Contents

Acknowledgments

I couldnt have written this book without the help of my friends, and I wouldnt have written it without their encouragement. I dont dare try to list all the rod makers, dealers, collectors, and fishermen who have helped me out over the years by showing me and sometimes selling me rods, feeding me technical and historical information in terms simple enough for me to understand, and passing on their strongly held and sometimes conflicting opinions.

I do owe special thanks to A. K. Best and Ed Engle for years of great fishing and great talk about bamboo rodsamong other things. Thanks to Pat Leonard and Mike Price for looking over the manuscript (both claimed not to be editors, then went on to do some pretty hard-nosed editing) and to my two bamboo rod gurus, John Bradford and Mike Clark, who have helped me to form some strongly held and conflicting opinions of my own.

John Gierach

Lyons, Colorado

Introduction

S ome things have changed in the seventeen years since I published Fishing Bamboo . For one thing, I fish graphite rods more often than I used to for the usual reasons of convenience and peace of mind. Ive come to see bamboo rods as less of a social statement and more of an unencumbered preference, so I no longer have to agonize over what kind of rod I grab on the way out the door. The logic behind the decision is purely aesthetic, so I couldnt explain it if I had to, and of course I dont have to.

There are some compelling practical reasons for choosing graphite over bamboo. Four-piece graphite rods are so common now that theyre almost standard; some of them cast beautifully and theyre really slick on airlines. I often travel with two 6-weights and two 8-weights that will cover anything, and four-piece graphites fit nicely in a duffle or in a short rod case that goes through most security screenings as your personal item. (Four-piece bamboo rods, with all those nickel-silver ferrules adding weight and dampening the action, have never been successful. Thats why you almost never see them.) And with the lifetime guarantees some graphite rods come with, or inexpensive replacement sections, breaking a graphite rod is just an annoyance instead of the heartbreak the same accident would be with an irreplaceable old bamboo rod.

For that matter, some guides are still uncomfortable having bamboo rods in their boats for fear theyll get broken. For the record, theyre no easier to break than graphite, but some people are more squeamish about them and, granted, there are plenty of opportunities to break rods with two fishermen, a guide, and sometimes a golden retriever stumbling around in a 16-foot drift boat. I used to insist on bamboo, but I guess Ive mellowed. If nothing else, I realized that making your guide uncomfortable isnt the best way to kick off a day of fishing.

But then none of that amounts to a hard and fast rule (Im too easy on myself for that) so I still fish bamboo rods from boatsthose owned by friends or by guides who dont look twice at a wood rodand I still get on plenty of airplanes with three-piece bamboo rods.

When I fished the old Spruce Creek Club in Pennsylvania with bamboo rod maker Walt Carpenter, I never thought of bringing anything but bamboo. The same goes for any small stream or any trip involving cutthroats or brook trout, including the bruiser brook trout in Labrador. Ive been there seven or eight times nowIve lost trackbut never without the Labrador Special. Thats a bamboo rod Mike Clark made for me in 1994: an 8-foot, three-piece 6/7-weight with a detachable 2-inch fighting butt designed to fish anything from medium-sized dry flies to streamers to deer hair mice and to land heavy, stubborn fish.

Then again, I caught my biggest Labrador brook trout ever on a different rod: an 8-foot, three-piece, 6-weight Leonard Tournament that was built in the 1920s. Best guess, the fish weighed less than ten pounds, but more than nine, and it bent one of the tips of that old Leonard into the shape of an apostrophe. I keep meaning to have it straightened, but never quite get around to it.

And when I was invited to fish Judge John Voelkers famous (and still secret) Frenchmans Pond in Michigans Upper Peninsula, I brought a pretty old Wright & McGill Granger 8-foot 5-weight and got the chance to cast Voelkers own Morris Kushner rod. Im not normally intimidated by bamboo rods and usually preach that theyre just fishing poles and should be treated as such, but the late Judges heirloom rod scared me to death and I couldnt wait to give it back to my host.

In other words, I still do most of my fishing with split-bamboo rods, often with a four-piece graphite stashed in the truck as a spare. In over forty years of fly fishing, Ive broken surprisingly few rods and only two of those were bamboo (and both were my fault), but I still make it a rule to bring a spare so if I do break a rod, I can keep fishing instead of going home with my tail between my legs. For that matter, if a friend breaks a rod, its easier to hand him your spare graphite rod than an old bamboo dripping with happy memories.