The story is not over...

A lovely little thing!

But not mine.

He is going to fish with a bamboo rod of his own making this season

A friend of mine, the engineer, has been busy. Actually, he has not been all that busy as all this began over a year ago, but he has made a lot of work.



Sure he still has a lot of work to do, but I'd state it as a fact, that he is going to fish with his brand new 7'2" 4 weight Driggs River when the greatest evening hatch of the summer arrives.



And, I'm not going to fish with my own made cane rod. Not this summer. (My progress is detailed on the last picture.)

Splitting cane

I'll bet the Swedish knife manufacturer didn't see this one coming.



At first it was hard, then you figured it out and began to think it's easy. A bad mistake, as the split starts to wander with your mind.

Trick is to bend the wider side. The difficulty is that the narrower side bends a lot easier.

Social rod maker

What I didn’t know was that the hobby of making bamboo fly rods is such a social activity. Much of the work is done alone, but a lot more time is spent talking with fellow rod makers, 3-years-old daughter who wants a pink fly rod, 5-year-old son who wants a rod longer than his dad has, workmates, friends, and, well, just about everybody willing to listen. At some point a sister-in-law’s husband told me about a guy that only ever speaks about cars. I got the point.



I believe that most of bamboo rod makers are engineers. Books, articles and internet sites about bamboo fly rod making deal at least as much about construction of required tools and machinery, as they deal with the actual process of bamboo crafting. My task is to prove to the world that a humanist can craft a bamboo fly rod. The small print is that this particular humanist has partnered with an engineer to build bamboo fly rods.



Tools and machinery is one of the reasons this hobby is so social. If you don’t have all the tools, and believe me – you don’t, you can either construct (engineering degree doesn’t hurt), buy (costs about ten times as much as the materials for a bamboo fly rod), or you can borrow them. I prefer the last, so it takes a bit mingling with the right people to make the rod.

Splintering Cane: Feminine Reactions

I told my wife that the friend I'm going to build bamboo rods with had bought a bamboo fly rod.
- Why he wants to build a bamboo rod if he already bought one? She asked.
Why do the birds sing? Why the green is green? What keeps a rock from crumbling into dust?

The friend told he was casting his split-cane in the yard. A lady, a neighbor, walks past with a dog and smiles.
It is January, there is snow on the ground, pretty cold, about a hundred meters to the nearest lake shore, frozen lake shore, a guy is casting a fly rod as old as she. What's there to smile about?