Regular Underground poster (if any Undergrounder could be called “regular”) and bamboo rod builder Mike Shay just announced the birth of a bouncing baby Web site dedicated to the bamboo fly rods he builds and sells.

Sure, he's crazy, but he builds nice rods

Since he’s seen fit to post largely frightening thoughtful comments here, we thought we’d give his Web site a plug – including revealing the secret link to the “Bamboo Orphanarium.”

It’s a hangout for bamboo rod geeks of the highest order (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Is Shay a bamboo addict in addition to being a builder? You decide:

Then one day while fishing a small stream north of Los Angeles, swatting the damn black flies feasting on my blood and leaving welts that last for weeks, I cast a friend’s bamboo rod.

Suddenly…fly fishing, fly casting, made sense! I found my missing piece of the puzzle. The softness, the power, the miraculous ability to land a fly where I actually wanted it to land was…mind expanding! The heavens opened and the meaning of life was revealed!

Poor Shay laments the fact that he has few photographs of the rods he builds, which immediately aroused the humanitarian side of the Underground: build and send me a couple, Mike, and I’ll see to it they get fished to within an inch of their lives photographed in several highly scenic locations.

On the Underground, the giving never stops. Never.

See you waving cane, Tom Chandler.

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