Now we bring you the latest in high-tech gadgetry for the bamboo snob. The bamboo smartphone:

You can almost smell the varnish, eh?

It’s a shame I’m already equipped with a water-and-shock-resistant Casio smartphone. Because nothing says “effete bamboo fly rod snob” more completely than a bamboo smartphone (though it would be better if it were engraved with something like “Friends that Fish Anything But Paynes Are No Friends At All“).

Once again, it’s left to the Trout Underground to maintain the high standards of snobbishness and elitism this sport needs to succeed over the next several decades.

No need to thank me, though a new ascot would be nice.

See you pretending to be rich, Tom Chandler.

New life for a failed prototype? My long-sought-after all-around 5wt?

Years ago he handed me a prototype 8’3″ 4/5 weight hollowbuilt rod — a slightly stronger, more progressive take on his popular 8’3″ 4wt. While it fished nicely with a 4wt at short ranges, when you really aired it out, it became clear the tips were too light for the mid section.

Just when the rest of the rod was getting going, the tips started flopping.

It was an experiment and experiments sometimes fail, though this one now seems to have a silver lining.

When all this happened Raine was finalizing his 8’3″ 5wt staggered ferrule “Simplicity” rod and didn’t really need another 8’3″ 5wt in the lineup, so he moved on to mucking about with other tapers, and I kept the rod, occasionally fishing it and ultimately breaking four inches off one of the tips.

Eventually — like a lot of bamboo fly rod builders — Raine let someone buy his own fly rod right out of his hands, and then realized he didn’t have anything to fish himself.

I’d returned the original prototype 8’3″ 4/5 to get get a new tip-top glued on the broken tip and have the grip turned down a bit, and — desperate for a fly rod to fish that night — he took it to the river and gave it a workout.

He called the next day and said “I know how to fix this.”

Over the next two weeks he built a slightly heavier tip for it on a flatter taper, and the first time I cast it, I suspected I’d finally found my all-around 5wt.

I’ll have to fish it a bunch to be sure (a trip to the river has ended a lot of love affairs that began on a casting lawn), but a powerful-but-supple 8’3″ 3-pc hollowbuilt 5wt sounds like just the all-around 5wt I’ve searched for the last 12 years.

Frankly, adding to the attraction is the rod’s status as a prototype — a simple test bed built with whatever was at hand.

There’s no tipping on the wraps, the simple reel seat is scarred (it was pulled off another prototype), and bamboo in the new tip section doesn’t come close to matching the bamboo in the butt section.

Frankly, I like stuff that’s clearly created for a purpose (I’ll never understand gloss-black, lowered pickup trucks), and a fly rod like this lacks any hint of the bling that reduces so many bamboo fly rods to fashion statements.

I suppose that’s why I mostly drive a 24 year-old basic Toyota pickup and mostly own bamboo fly rods from people like Raine, Thramer and Beasley.

See you on the river (testing my ugly prototype), Tom Chandler.

The cold spring meant the wildflowers were firing on all cylinders (they should have been done a month ago), and everything that wasn’t a flower wore the hard-working green of summer leaves.

[nggallery id=1]
(click the images to see full-size versions)

Older Bro and I hiked into this tiny alpine meadow stream based on his recommendation; “You’ll love it, though don’t get too excited about the size of the fish.”

I knew exactly what he meant.

And frankly, I was proud of him. He’s a relatively new fly fisherman, but aside from the casting and the knots and drag-free drifts, he’s already mastered the art of couching his recommendations in case the weather’s bad or the trout are sulking or the other guy’s a headhunter.

I’ll be blunt; I think a lot more people say they love these little streams than actually fishes them; they’re pretty, but for a lot of fly fishermen, fish that seem to top out at 9 inches (we got one 13″ and one 10″ fish on this trip) add a little glitter to that other, bigger water.

Still, we hiked the length of the meadow and fished our way back up, and before we even strung up our fly rods my heart rate was picking up.

I even tried a couple of the standard gambits on him (“Didn’t you notice the special reg poster at the ranger station? This stretch is bamboo fly rods only…”).

Sadly, he didn’t fall for any of them, but then, he’d probably been disappointed if I didn’t try.

I admit I was disappointed by the state of my lower body after we got back to the car; if we went farther than six miles I’ll eat my government surplus Boonie hat, yet I felt like I’d been crossed the continental divide, and with a heavy pack.

The late, great Jim Gade once told me that the way to avoid geezerhood was to not start thinking like you were an old man. “Once you start thinking you’re a geezer, you’ll start feeling like one.”

Tomorrow — if I can drive a stake through a couple projects — I’m going for a walk.

The Fishing Details

I fished a (probably) 60 year-old Phillipson Peerless 8′ 5wt, and I was reminded that although the rod wasn’t necessarily designed to cast a leader, the mass of the bamboo in the tip does tend to load the rod when there isn’t enough line to do so.

And if you’ve worked your way through the pictures, you can imagine how rarely we cast more than a foot or two of line.

As you might imagine, fly selection wasn’t exactly critical, though given the sheer tonnage of grass and insect life living around the stream, I wasn’t surprised when the Arizona Mini-Hopper worked slightly better (OK, it’s hard to know for sure) than anything else I tried.

After all, it’s as much a beetle or caddis as it is a hopper, which seems like a pretty ideal combination for a stream so often visited by terrestrial bugs.

See you somewhere green and wavy and Brookie-filled and beautiful, Tom Chandler.

On my foot.

Bees hiding in my slippers? Really?

I told the L&T this was scientifically valid proof that my feet smell like honey, but in keeping with the TU’s PG-13 rating, I’m not going to print her reply.

Instead, I’m going to clean a little house, shoveling a few links your way before they overrun my desk, especially as I’m packing goodies for my Weekend Brookie Trip.

Jamming a few flies and some tippet in the new backpack is easy; deciding which rod to fish is the tough bit. The 8.5′ 4wt Diamondglass? The 8′ 4wt Superfine? The 8′ 5wt Phillipson bamboo fly rod?

The weight of fly rod selection weighs on heavy on any angler...

Sometimes life just feels so heavy, you know?

Starting Another Rod Test

I recently dug out the wallet to finance a new fly rod, though (remain calm), it’s a relatively cheap one — an 8′ 5wt fiberglass rod from South Fork Rods (built by Margot and Dave Redington, whose last name might sound familiar).

Naturally, I don’t need another 8′ 5wt (I’ve got several brilliant 8′ 5wt rods already), but the 8′ 5wt is my fly rod equivalent of Chili Verde; a baseline food that I use to compare new Mexican restaurants with those I already know.

Thus if a new Chile Verde (or 8′ 5wt fly rod) is brilliant, it’s possibly (likely even) that the rest of the menu (or fly rods in the line) are also brilliant.

(While the rest of you are out fishing, I’m creating ISO 9000-level processes for making the world a better place.)

First glance? It’s nicely made but looks a little clunky, and like so many rod builders these days, the grip doesn’t exactly overwhelm. For an 8′ glass rod it’s surprisingly strong (it says “5wt” on the website but “5/6wt” on the rod), which is either a useful thing or an odd performance characteristic for a rod you’d say was probably going to be fished at close range.

More as I fish it.

Russell Chatham Goes Broke in Montana

I read this article on the SF Gate site about Russell Chatham abandoning Montana after overinvesting in real estate, losing his shirt, and deciding he couldn’t take a 40th Montana winter.

He’s back in San Francisco and painting to pay the bills (at least his paintings still fetch big dollars), and the whole thing feels timely now because I also recently took delivery of a couple books from his just-revived Clark City Press publishing imprint.

I bought a copy of Silent Seasons and The River We Bring With Us, but — embarrassingly — forgot to also order a copy of Chatham’s seminal essay work about fly fishing the west coast in the 60s and 70s (The Angler’s Coast).

I plan to rectify that in the near future, but in the meantime, I believe his publishing house is run by his daughter, and if you ever wanted to own any of the classics in their backlist (or their new titles), then hurry on over.

When a couple of your fly fishing buddies are bamboo rod builders, you get to test a fair number of new fly rod tapers, and while you think casting a new rod would be straightforward, at times the it can feel more like a first date than a scientific process.

You don’t want to be swayed by the electricity of the moment, yet acting like a sour dullard won’t get you anywhere either. Things tend to be a little tentative at first, and while those first moments seem momentous, they’re generally far less critical than they seem at the time (thought it’s true you only get one first impression).

I have to admit that my casting isn’t all it could be, so while some rods really sing on the grass, they don’t cut it for me on the river.

The famous Paul Young style semi-parabolic rods are a good example; on the lawn I’m a god with the things, but on the river—where you’re staring down the barrel of difficult drifts, a little wind and the pressure applied by rising fish—things tend to go off the rails a little.

It turns out semi-parabolics respond poorly to being pushed, which is precisely what I do when trout are rising and I’m not connecting.

You might consider my lack of self-improvement (in the casting department) a personality flaw, but I prefer to think that simply recognizing it is evidence of a heightened sense of self-awareness.

That way I can congratulate myself and move on.

Bamboo rod gatherings are basically mega versions of the small, friends-only event; you get a lot of guys and fly rods together in one place and cast rods you’d never seen built by makers you never heard of.

It sounds wonderful and it is—right up to the moment you walk away with a “must-buy” list five rods long, and even before you’re done doing those financial calculations in your head, you know there’s disappointment waiting in your future.

Naturally, some rods disappoint you right away; others impress in a way that convinces you it’s time to sell pints of blood before the second backcast even straightens out.

Most fall somewhere in between, and some rods you don’t warm up to for quite some time. Others perform wonderfully on the casting range yet fail in actual practice, and as I noted above, that can probably be laid at the caster’s door.

Plus, you can’t overlook the conditions; when the wind is whistling down the Upper Sacramento River canyon, it tends to blow pretty hard across the face of Raine’s rod shop, yet if you’re standing on the side and casting towards the back (it’s usually warmer there), your untouched-by-the-wind forward casts unroll beautifully while your backcasts hook to the right and feel awful to your hand.

Casting a sweet lightline rod in the wind is also a prescription for disappointment, and in fact, I first fished an 8′ 4wt Orvis Superfine Touch graphite rod on the full-sized Upper Sacramento River during a windy day, and if that’s the only chance it got, you’d have to conclude it was a marginally useful rod.

Since then it’s been fished (by myself and others) on a couple of small streams, where it shines brightly indeed.

In other words, better check the wind before you decide to hate on a rod.

Once I fished with a guy in Tennessee who insisted the Phillipson he borrowed from me lacked the power to turn over the fly, and I finally got tired of listening to the complaints and watched him for a while before realizing his leader was a massive piece of overlong shit, and wouldn’t turn over a fly made of anti-matter, much less a bushy #10 Catskill dry.

At lunch I cut it back by a good six feet and re-tied it with a fairly rapid taper, and suddenly the rod was, you know, “fishing great.”

OK, Heavy Handed Moral #2: learn to tie a decent leader.

In any case, testing a fly rod offers one sizable advantage over dating; if you wake up with something and you’re suddenly unsure of your commitment to the relationship, you can sell a fly rod.

See you, fly rods in hand, Tom Chandler.

First, because I selflessly work my fingers to the bone for the Undergrounders — expecting little in return save the occasional bowl of gruel — it’s pretty clear I’ll be headed skyward when the earth starts belching fire and clouds of stinging asps bearing the face of Donald Trump emerge and go all medieval on the poor schlubs left behind.

It’s equally clear that most of the unappreciative Undergrounders — who never truly recognized my genius and are about to pay dearly for the oversight — will be among the poor schlubs, and it seems only fair to say the following:

Neener. Neener.

You see, not only am I going to a better place (apparently the hot water never runs out), I’ll be headed there with a fly rod in my hand.

Longtime bamboo buddy Dave Roberts and I have been absent from each other’s fishing calendar for far too long, and if the Rogue River’s barely fishable flows hold up, I’ll be cruising north and fishing the just-underway Upper Rogue stonefly hatch for steelhead.

The last time we did this, a great, big, ginormous steelhead ate the big stonefly dry right in front of me, and because I’m a cool, steely eyed fly fishing sonofabitch (“I shot a man in Dunsmuir once just to watch him die”), I set on him like I was trying to club myself with the fly rod, immediately snapping the 3x tippet before… actually clubbing myself with the fly rod.

Dad would have been so proud.

And yes, the Rogue’s flows are unstable enough that there is a Plan B.

A secret Plan B.

The Gear Rapture

Dave Roberts and I met long before I moved to Dunsmuir, sharing an affinity for dry flies, small streams, colorful trout and bamboo fly rods.

We’ve been fast friends ever since, even to the point of Dave being the best man at my wedding (I needed a steady, calm, bamboo-style guy marshaling the flask of Irish Whiskey which kept me from soiling myself on The Happiest Day of My Life).

Over time, our paths have diverged; I’m pretty set for bamboo fly rods while Dave probably qualifies for some kind of intervention.

I’ll bring a strong 6wt fly rod and nymph if needed, but because it’s Dave, I’m also bringing my 8’6″ James Beasley-built Payne Canadian Canoe rod, which is a nice 7wt at stonefly ranges.

And just in case we end up on the highly technical Holy Water, I’ll pack a nice bamboo 5wt (haven’t decided which yet).

If I’m taken in the rapture, I want to be taken while in possession of a couple nice fly rods.

See you headed skyward (well, not most of you), Tom Chandler.

The winning rod?

That’s why I’m happy to see Hardy USA and the Catskill Fly Fishing Center & Museum holding a bamboo fly rod casting competition in August.

Given the age of most bamboo rod owners, we’re tempted to dub it “Dinosaurs Casting Dinosaurs” (me included), but hey, anything that offers a Hardy bamboo rod as a prize and uses the age of the fly rod as a tiebreaker is fine with me:

Livingston Manor, NY. On August 6, 2011 Hardy USA and The Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum (CFFCM) will hold the first annual Hardy Bros. Cup casting competition, at the 29th Summerfest and Anglers Market at the CFFCM. This annual casting event will be open to all individuals and the only requirement is to use a bamboo fly rod 9′ in length or smaller. This casting contest will be based on two distance casts and one accuracy cast. Handicaps will be applicable to rods under 8′ in length and a tie breaker will be determined by the age of the rod. Casters should be able to cast a sight fly 50 feet with a 7.5′ leader.

See you practicing, Tom Chandler.

That’s because bamboo fly rod builders are a uniformly odd bunch (though not in the sense that you’re afraid to give them your phone number), and in a sport like fly fishing, you don’t want to lose touch with the happily odd characters that make it richer than the fishing might suggest.

After all, bamboo fly rod builders are driven to do a sometimes tedious thing, and – once you calculate the hours and tools vs the money – do it rather cheaply.

That smacks of obsession with craft instead of obsession with money, and given my daily exposure to the marketing world – where the latter is the only accepted measure – there are times I’m happily reminded the former still exists.

I profiled Beasley on my blog years ago (Part I here, Part II here), and still own (and fish) five of his bamboo fly rods.

That's my 8.5' 5wt Beasley, taken on a 2.5 year-old alpine trip (click to read that story)

He wanted to know how my life as a parent was working out, and we talked about 2010, which was his slowest year since he started building full time.

That only means he worked twice as hard as a retired Methodist Minister probably should (in a typical year, he works four times harder than is smart). It also meant he finally had more time to experiment with fly rod tapers.

If you don’t know Beasley, he’s famous for his adaptation of the Paul Young Perfectionist taper – an astonishingly sweet 7.5′ 4wt rod that became so popular, at one point it represented almost 3/4 of his annual rod output.

A classic fly rod dealer still has a standing order for every Perfectionist he can build.

You’d think that kind of demand would gratify a rod builder, but Beasley – like a lot of fly rod builders – is an inveterate tinkerer; he’d rather muck about with new tapers than simply churn out copies of an existing model, so an insatiable demand for a single model isn’t the blessing you’d think it was.

In fact, he once related it was something of a drag.

Originally – on a tip from a friend in the Southeast – I called and talked to him about the Perfectionist (this was in the mid-to-late 1990s). Halfway through the call – despite my attempts to play it cool – I couldn’t take it any more and ordered a Perfectionist over the phone, breaking a rule I’d instituted after getting stuck with a few below-par rods.

When I did it, I noticed he groaned just a little.

That led to the story about the number of backorders for the Perfectionist, and the news that I’d have to wait a while for mine.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure how I was going to scrape together the money, so a little wait wasn’t a problem.

After the rod was delivered (ahead of schedule), I discovered it was actually better than the hype, which led to another series of phone calls.

One thing led to another, and on my next trip to Tennessee, I found myself in Beasley’s backyard, which is when he handed me his version of the Leonard 50DF.

I’ve been largely indifferent to the Leonard tapers, my limited experience suggesting the value of the original Leonard rods was due more to nostalgia than fishing quality.

I expected little, but distinctly remember going “ooofff” when I first cast the thing (love at first backcast), and I ordered that on the spot too.

Beasley’s rod cast beautifully (mine still does; I fished it this fall), but the choice of thread for the wraps was beyond awful, and the reel seat would have impressed only if it was a prototype can opener.

When I ordered mine, I – gracefully, I thought – insisted he wrap it with his normally elegant, sweetly restrained colors, which is when he told me the story of his Maker’s Rod; the 50DF he kept building for himself, only to have someone come by, cast the thing, and insist on buying it on the spot.

In a fit of reverse marketing, Beasley built one for himself, but wrapped it in colors so awful that no angler – even those who had fallen under the taper’s spell – could possibly buy it on the spot.

After you hear a story like that about a builder, you begin talking to him more regularly, and – because I was more interested in the rods he wanted to build than those he was churning out – went to the head of his growing waiting list when I asked him to build me an experimental 8.5′ 5wt (based on a just-postwar Orvis taper) and his interpretation of an 8.5′ 6/7wt Payne Canadian Canoe taper.

Along the way, I picked up an early Beasley that was based on a Walt Carpenter taper (a sweet 8′ 5wt with a swelled butt that was oddly marked for a 6wt), and while I haven’t bought a bamboo fly rod in several years (a kid tends to alter your priorities), I still felt that familiar pull on the phone when he described his in-progress alterations to the storied 8′ 6wt Paul Young Para 15 taper.

He was modifying the Para 15 in the same way he’d modified the Perfectionist, and while Paul Young fans will probably send me white-hot emails for suggesting it, he’d improved the Perfectionist in pretty much every way, and appeared to be turning the sometimes-clubby Para-15 into a lithe, graceful 5wt.

I had a long-term flirtation with semi-parabolic tapers like Paul Young’s, though I rarely fish them any more (in addition to Beasley’s Perfectionist, I still own rods built on Para 15 and Para 14 tapers).

They all cast wonderfully on the lawn, but perform less reliably for me on the water. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools – and the problems were clearly the product of a defective fly fisherman, not defective fly rod tapers – but when the fishing got tense, I tended to react in ways my paras didn’t appreciate.

To quote Dirty Harry, a man’s got to know his limitations, and one of mine, apparently, is casting semi-parabolic rods during hatches.

Still, I caught myself chatting on the phone while my mind calculated the number bills vs incoming cash flow, and it didn’t get any better when he mentioned his 6’8″ FE Thomas 3wt – a taper that almost everyone admits is the nicest in its class, and is probably even better when built by Beasley.

Prior to this year, a 6’8″ 3wt is a rod I’d have said I didn’t have much use for, but now I can actually see as to how I’d fish one on a regular basis, which meant temptation is once again my constant companion.

It’s also true that bamboo fly rods may come without warranties, but unlike mass-produced graphite, they often come attached to an undeniably personal history of their builder.

Beasley’s rods may arrive in the angler’s hands garnished with the story about his intentionally ugly Maker’s rod, or his dry, humor-in-slow-motion references to all the Perfectionists he’s built, or the laid-back Southern enthusiasm that shows through when he dives deeply into an explanation of a taper modification.

In the same vein, I can’t pick up a Thramer without thinking of his hovering-a-few-inches-off-the-ground energy; or fish a Raine without remembering the day he casually mentioned sinking a wad of cash into building a computer-controlled mill of his own design (I simply asked where he planned to live after the divorce).

Lately, I’ve read a few comments on the Internet suggesting that fly fishing really is all about the numbers and size of the fish you catch, a perspective foreign enough that I re-scanned the text for the “nots” or “nevers” I’d surely missed.

It may be true (which once again leaves me far from the mainstream), or it might simply be another sign of the attempted extremeification of the sport, but it’s difficult to see how much room it leaves for intangibles like tiny streams, Maker’s Rods or bamboo fly rod builders who will build you the same rod they build for everyone else, but would rather you asked them for something a little less ordinary.

See you on the river, Tom Chandler.

That’s why I wasn’t wholly surprised to stumble across the Colt Rod Company and its “revolutionary” technology:

We give you… the “Revolutionary” six-sided fishing rod:

I guess "An idea we stole from rods over 100 years old" just didn't sing...

I don’t know who Colt Rods are; I’ve never seen one in person, and while they’re currently selling conventional rods, they haven’t yet brought their fly rods to market. (When they do, we’d be happy to receive a dozen or so in a plain, unmarked package for revenue enhancement testing purposes.)

Still, I can’t help but smile a bit at the labeling of better than century-old technology six-sided construction as “Revolutionary.”

You could argue that Colt’s “I-beam” technology was different from bamboo’s solid structure, but I’d also suggest that the work of cutting edge bamboo hollowbuilders like Wayne Maca, Per Brandin, Thramer, Reams and Raine offers some striking similarities.

In any case, I frankly think Colt’s rods look interesting – maybe even cool, though again, you’d expect someone like me to think that. (It’s possible I have a taste for the different when it comes to fly fishing tackle.)

They might actually have something here (I've been arguing for hollowbuilt bamboo rods for years)

You’d have to figure they’d be heavier than regular cylindrical graphite rods, but then, I’ve always thought weight was more important to marketers than fishermen (being a bamboo/fiberglass guy, I would think that).

From the outside, they look a lot like the old Hexagraph rods, but those were carbon strips laminated atop foam – essentially a solid-built construction.

Want proof that this isn’t anything like your grandfather’s bamboo rod? Read this:

After being finished, the rods then go through a final step where the new owner’s information is electronically loaded on to the visible RFID chip located above the handle of the rod.

I get the feeling these rods won’t be cheap.

Once Colt ships us a large package containing many rods for testing, we’ll let you know how their revolutionary concept holds up.

See you in science class, Tom Chandler.

UPDATE: A couple people have suggested (via social media channels) that I’m exposing something here. In truth, I find the technology and rods pretty interesting, though I have to admit to finding the “revolutionary” tagline a trifle amusing.  Good luck to Colt…

My first writing projects were pounded out on a typewriter (is GeezerWriter.com available?), and while my 70s electric was hardly an antique, I’m like most writers – I still get goose bumps when I see an old typewriter.

It’s akin to the feeling a lot of fly fishermen get when they see that familiar, wheat colored flash of a bamboo fly rod.

Basically, you can’t look away.

That’s why antiquetypewriters.com stopped me in my tracks.

For those with a penchant for the machines that writers formerly used to put words to paper, the lovingly photographed antiquetypewriters.com site represents the motherload.

In an era when novels are being written on cell phones, big, clunky typewriters have undergone a transformation.

In simple terms, they no longer bear the burden of functioning as useful tools.

They’ve become little mechanical works of art.

While I wouldn’t trade my out-of-control text processor addiction for a typewriter (I can stop any time I want), I admit writing’s current “fire hose” approach to productivity lacks the elegance of thinking first, and writing second.

Then again, I’m not wholly blinded by the nostalgia of these things. After all, writers have a reputation for hitting the bottle pretty hard – a trait I once suggested was the result of typewriter use in the pre Liquid Paper/self-correcting ribbon era.

See you at the keyboard, Tom Chandler.