I’m busy enough that I’ve largely declared online bankruptcy, so I didn’t notice the interview was published (last week) until a reader told me yesterday. (As you can see, nothing in the fly fishing world escapes me.)

Yes, two Trout Underground interviews in two months; it's a world gone mad...

Fortunately, Hunt — who now works for Trout Unlimited (the other, less-popular TU) and writes the popular Eat More Brook Trout blog — handles the email interview skillfully (more skillfully than the interviewee), and as Gierach pointed out, few writers have the willpower to skip past their own reviews.

Here’s an excerpt that caught my eye:

He’s witty and maybe a bit of a cynic–if you’ve ready any of his posts at TU, you already know that his writing has an edge to it that does one of two things: it either makes you think to yourself, “Damn, I wish I had written that,” or, frankly, it turns you off. It’s honest writing though, and even if you don’t like the message, I think, deep down, you likely admire the way it’s delivered.

Having recently been called out by name by another blogger for being “boring,” I find I like “edgy” better, though I always wonder how much of my edge is real and how much is simple sleep deprivation.

After reading the interview, I get the sense I really am too busy for my own good; I see too many very obvious, very missed opportunities.

Then again, writers and regret have always come as a matched set.

Still, we’re all about crowdsourcing here at TU, so feel free to read the interview, and leave a comment (on his blog or mine), and let me know what you think.

While you’re at it, take a look at Hunt’s fly fishing essay book (Shin Deep). I own a copy, read it, liked it, and yet still haven’t reviewed it (that busy thing again).

See you on the rubber chicken circuit, Tom Chandler

The words “fly fishing” appear nowhere in this interview, but I do talk to someone who wrote a stunning memoir about falconry — a sport even more obscure than fly fishing.

Rebecca O'Connor and friend

And yes, the fact the author is single, attractive, talented and a real tequila fiend means the interview should prove interesting to large swaths of the Undergrounders.

Just saying.

See you over there, Tom Chandler.

p.s. — I review O’Connor’s most-excellent LIFT memoir here.

Author Anders Halverson

Halverson wrote the surprisingly riveting An Entirely Synthetic Fish– the story of the spread of the rainbow trout across the United States. Despite it being the winner of the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award, I expected the book to be dry and lifeless, but Halverson’s an excellent storyteller, and I gave it an excellent review on the Underground.

I like doing interviews with interesting people, and in this one Halverson touches on a handful of subjects, including these two startling factoids about interbreeding of frogs and fish:

Q: Are hatcheries less harmful than they used to be?**

Yes. They’ve gotten much smarter about the genetics and and other aspects of fish culture. For example, they’ve gotten much better about collecting and using wild fish in their spawning operations.

Nevertheless, whenever you raise something in a hatchery, it’s an artificial environment with very different selection pressures. The fish that come out are very different from the fish that are spawned in the wild.

My graduate work in frogs taught me that these systems are far more complex than we realize. We don’t have any real idea what’s happening out there.

For example, in one of my experiments, I put fences around these ponds and captured every frog that was coming into breed. I took a tissue sample from everyone. Then I used DNA fingerprinting to identify all their offspring, and it was clear that the frogs had somehow recognized their close kin and avoided breeding with them.

It was also clear that the more inbred the tadpoles were, the less likely they were to make it out of the pond.

Q: Wow.

The tools we have — we’re just wandering around out there with a bludgeon.

As another example, I recently heard a talk about a study in the Smokies (ED: Great Smoky Mountains National Park); they removed rainbows from a stream and stocked brookies from three different tributaries, and 15 years later, their offspring show no signs of interbreeding. Nobody knows why.

When we approach these problems, we need to recognize our limitations, and structure our solutions accordingly.

Let’s just ignore the fact that I responded to an award-winning author’s insightful answer with “wow” (clearly a career highlight). Instead let’s focus on the fact that frogs and brookies know enough not to interbreed with kin, but apparently many humans don’t.

In a less cynical vein, there’s his exploration of the now-infamous poisoning of the Green River, the location of the first hatchery on the McCloud River (currently under 300 feet of water), and even rubber vs felt.

Read every word of the interview’s essential goodness here.

See you on Charlie Rose, Tom Chandler.

John Gierach

As testament to his broad appeal, all 16 of his essay books — dating back to the original Trout Bum in 1986 — are still in print. In a small publishing niche — where 4,000 books is a pretty good run for an essay title — Gierach’s hardcovers and paperbacks sell upwards of 60,000-70,000 books per title.

In other words, not only does Gierach have a lot of fans, he’s one of the tiny handful of fly fishing writers (some suggest he’s the only writer) making a decent living in the fly fishing genre.

He’s also an interesting interview; he’s remarkably unguarded, and as a result, the conversation tends to take on interesting shapes. As an interviewer, you’re willing to take a few chances to see what happens.

A note about this interview; Gierach and I talked at length and he also answered a few questions via email, and while I tried to avoid transcription errors, any odd Gierach phrasings or other errors are the result of my frantic scribbling. I did rearrange the order of the larger subject areas, and at times chopped away some of the less-relevant digressions.

Without further qualification…

Gierach On “No Shortage Of Good Days”

Q: In an interview, you suggested your earlier books were cobbled-together essay collections, but that later efforts are actually books that have been pieced out as essays. Which of those best describes No Shortage of Good Days?

Actually, I would say this new one is more on that older model. I think what I meant is that I have a book in mind, and I sometimes write the essays that way. I sort of carry a book in my mind, but it’s not like I have an outline already written.

I’m an instinctive writer; I don’t think about this stuff. I suspect I’m a guy who has been picking away at this same theme for the last 16 books.

Q: That theme being?

My theme is how do you live in the world as it is, while that world really tries to step on that? That’s really the only question isn’t it; how do you live?

Q: You refer to what I’ll call “fly fishing’s class wars” a bit more here than in prior books.

I think I notice it more. I’m more aware of it because I end up stumbling into this other end of it. For the longest time I was just this little blue collar fly fishing hippie, and as I get more well known, I’m suddenly in these places I never dreamed I’d find, or in some cases even existed.

If you’re a writer — hell a thinking human being — you’re bound to ask yourself exactly what this means. And what’s my role, I’m here as a guest, and I paid for the plane ticket, but this trip would have cost a $100K if I’d paid for it, which you couldn’t even do.

As something of a populist, how am I supposed to feel about this?

So yeah, you think about this stuff. It’s just odd. This is how some people do it. We’re all some kind of populists out here in the west, and you have to ask why isn’t this public water?

I don’t know if I have an answer.

Q: Your earlier books introduced us to people like AK Best, Mike Clark and Ed Engle — and did so in some depth — yet the people you write about these days don’t seem as fully revealed to your readers. It that a conscious thing? Did you find people getting skittish about showing up in your books?

The reason is that I don’t know those people as well. I don’t know Jim Babb as well as I know AK Best. I don’t have the decades of history with some of these folks. And I may have said all there is to say about these guys, at least publicly. I mean I know a lot of stuff about AK Best that is none of my business, let alone any of yours, and maybe I’ve exhausted everything that needs to be publicly said.

When you’re writing about your friends, they’re kind of trusting you. I can reveal stuff about myself, but that’s my decision.

And yes, I’m traveling more on my own. It’s the worse recession in 30 years; everybody’s broke.

Q: I’m tempted to label this the small stream book — there might be more references to small streams in this book than there are in your actual small stream book.

I’ll have to check that, but these things are autobiographical, and that’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately.

Q: How do you think you fit into a more extreme fly fishing media landscape?

I’m suspicious of this trend towards making fly fishing an extreme sport. For example, on this book tour, I’m constantly asked “what do you think about the fly fishing film tour?”

I appreciate the adventure and the fishing they’re showing and technically it’s awesome stuff, but that’s just not the sport I recognize. Maybe I’m a little more invested in this pastoral stuff.

Q: That’s interesting. The video guys are trying make a living by going fishing and selling the experience, so in one sense, they’re the new Gierachs, the new trout bums — they’re your children.

I… I guess I can accept that. They’re into a counter-culture head — they live outside the mainstream.

And while I say I don’t recognize the sport, I do recognize those guys. Those are bohemian guys who don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about what they’re doing — they’re doing it for love, and I certainly recognize and understand that.

And those guys will grow up.

Q: In our earlier interview I compared Trout Bum to Kerouac’s On the Road, the idea being Trout Bum afforded fly fishers permission to view the sport — which was saddled with a painfully highbrow image — in a different context. It was possible to see it from the perspective of a subsistence, almost hippie, nearly obsessive lifestyle that also happened to be no big deal.

Again, I heard that a lot — that I wrote some kind of counterculture testament. You weren’t hearing about it, but what was going on was that there was a handful of guys in the West living this way; all these guys were exploring fly fishing as a possible path to enlightenment.

So while I think it’s fair to say Trout Bum was counter-culture, it’s also true I was just reporting what was going on. That’s what journalists do — they pick up the stuff they’re doing and start talking about it.

Q: I’d suggest you’ve achieved a largely iconic status, yet you seem largely bemused by it, especially while someone is fawning over you in a vid…

[Interrupting] Well, what would you do?

[ED: Point taken.]

Gierach on Steelheading

You once said that fly fishing for steelhead was going to be “your next thing.” Have you become one of those existentialist steelheaders?

I do it as much as I can; but I’m in the wrong place. I’m too far away.

I try to get out twice a year; in some years it’s only once. A couple times I didn’t go at all. One problem I had was that I was always trying to fish in the winter, which seemed like a great deal; go out and catch a steelhead when the fishing here was limited.

Problem is the flows are unstable and you plan a trip and the river’s blown out and you go anyway — which happened on one trip, when we probably shouldn’t have even gone. I suppose you’re kind of buffalo hunting — you’re doing something without much chance of success, but it’s there to do, and you might as well do it.

I finally started fishing in the fall, which makes all the difference in the world. You can use floating lines, the fish are more predictable and it’s not as cold.

Still, fishing in winter is really compelling; I recently fished a river I’ve been spey casting with conventional lines without success. I had no idea what wasn’t working, but my fly had no ability to get down.

Someone loaned me a new kind of sinking line and the clouds parted. The casting’s great and you can rocket those things across the river. Of course I’m a fly fisherman, so I came home and got on the phone and called people and told them I’ve got these rods, now what do I need to do this kind of thing?

So the winter fish are hard, but they’re still worth it. They’re huge and they’re bright and they’re raspy and they still have sea lice on them.

It’s worth it. It’s just worth it.

You may only get one or a few, but it’s like rhinoceros hunting; you don’t bag thirty of them, you get your Teddy Roosevelt picture holding it and leave it at that. It’s not about the body count, and more people should probably fish trout that way. They really should.

Q: You’ve been fly fishing for decades, yet when it comes to steelheading, you might be in the same boat as your average reader; it’s something you don’t do often enough to really stay sharp.

That’s right. Especially at first, when I was learning, I’d have trouble. But the last couple of times I’ve pretty much gone out and flubbed the first 2-3 casts, mostly because I was pushing with my top hand instead of pulling with the bottom. I’d remind myself to pull, and lately, I’ve recovered pretty quickly, and then I’m just fishing.

The thing I had to learn about spey casting was this; like so much in fly fishing, people make it more complicated than it has to be. I mean, It’s a change of direction roll cast. You put that loop in the right spot and punch it, and it’s going to go. You just have to remember to pull more on the bottom hand than the top hand.

Q: So why — given the distance — are you still doing it?

I don’t get jaded, but at the same time, I’ve been fly fishing for at least 35 years, and it’s cool to do something new. There’s an enthusiasm. And yes, it’s kind of less important that I catch fish now.

If you really don’t care about catching fish, you should just quit. But then, I write about actually catching fish a lot less than I used to.

My first time steelheading, I fished a week and caught two fish.

Q: You seem to have a predilection for that kind of difficult fishing — you keep returning to it. You fished at least a week in Scotland without a bite, your Atlantic Salmon trips have been hardly any better, and now you’re bombing around the Northwest to catch a couple fish over the course of a week.

When I fish small streams, I tend to catch a lot of fish and that’s great, but steelheading is very different. I know my local small streams pretty intimately and I’ve got the timing down, but with steelhead, you’re suddenly playing chess against somebody who really knows what they’re doing.

Especially when I go steelheading in the fall, I’ll come off my small creeks — which I fish about as well as anybody and I catch a lot of fish, and then I’m not.

And it’s really interesting to go out to somewhere and fish eight hours a day for a week and not catch anything, which is still really interesting to me.

It’s hard and it kind of makes you dig a little deeper — the idea that I’m going to fish my brains out and fish as well as I can and maybe I’ll catch one, maybe I won’t.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and there’s a lot of water within a day’s drive of my home I still haven’t fished yet. The stuff you know still applies, but there’s always some new wrinkle you have to work out. That’s just fascinating to me.

Gierach On Writing For a Living

Q: Editors of fly fishing magazines have admitted their pay rates essentially haven’t gone up since the 70s, and you’re probably one of two writers making a living in the fly fishing space. Have things gotten better or worse for writers in the fly fishing space?

The only reason I make a living is Simon & Schuster. There was a time when it possible to make a passable living freelancing [articles]. But that’s not the case any more.

This book is like my 16th; and they’re all out there making money for me.

The guys now aren’t making much money. I’m not sure I would be able to do today what I did then.

I’m frankly glad I don’t have to figure it out.

Q: What do you think about fly fishing’s online writers, the bloggers and ezine writers?

The quality of the writing is there, but the density isn’t. Something looks good and the idea is there, but then the essay just stops short. I don’t know if people are going to stretch out, or if this is the way it’s going.

Q: For a while you were writing for the New York Times; what’s it like to be a trout bum writing for this monstrous newspaper?

The problem was this; they were publishing one column a month, and that column would get bumped if a football player got a hangnail, and I called them and told them I couldn’t keep writing columns that I wasn’t going to get paid for.

The editor didn’t get it, and so I asked her if she had someone else she could call. She mentioned another guy, and I told her to call him next time.

It was the New York Times and it was very prestigious, and I wasn’t making any money.

Q: In the fly fishing niche — where an essay book is doing pretty well if it sells 4,000 copies — your first print runs are rumored to be in the 70,000 copy range. True?

For my last book I think they printed 26,000 hardcover copies, so if you add in the the paperback sales, that number is probably close (ED: I got the estimate from a well known book distributor.]

Q: That’s a lot of books in this industry. Why have you sold so many books and endured so long?

I have no absolutely no idea why that is; in private moments I’ll start to think I’m really that good, but that never lasts. I really think it’s because I’ve been around just so damned long.

Q: Have you ever heard of Imposter Syndrome?

What’s that?

Q: Every writer I’ve spoken to says that even after their first couple successes, they kept waiting to be discovered for the frauds they are.

Oh yeah, sure. I’m still waiting.

Q: You’ve said you write mostly in the winter so you can fish during the warmer months; is that strictly true, or do your deadlines enforce a fairly regular writing routine?

It’s as true as I can make it, but of course the reality of deadlines keeps me working more or less year around. It would be more accurate to say that I allow myself as much time as I want or need in season to fish locally or travel. And I still get the vast majority of work done over the winter.

Q: If so, do you write every day or chase XXXX words per week, or…?

I spend at least some time on the writing most of the days I’m home. That’s usually composing or editing, but also sometimes writing to editors and my agent and the other business that inevitably comes up. My problem isn’t forcing myself to write because I do it compulsively. My problem is forcing myself to stop for a while when I get stale.

I don’t chase word counts. A few thousand words a day is great (although they could eventually end up dumped or seriously pruned back) but so is a good, solid paragraph. Even a morning where I end up shit-canning every word amounts to progress because I’ve eliminated one possibility.

Q: With so many essays and articles under your belt, do you begin with some kind of formal process (outline, brainstorm, etc), or are you comfortable simply diving in? If so, what do you do when the thing comes off the rails on the 1456th word?

I like to start with an idea and a couple of thoughts about it and then dive in. I’m an instinctive, stream of consciousness writer, so I like to just turn over an interesting rock and see what crawls out.

When a story comes off the rails – and most do at one time or another – I leave it alone for a while. Sometimes it all comes clear the next morning. Other times it takes a month. Sometimes the problem is just the order of the story. A few months ago I had what I thought was a good lead, but it went nowhere. Then I realized it wasn’t the lead, it was the conclusion. Once in a great while a story just stalls and I abandon it.

Q: What writing tools do you use, and are you a stickler about them – or are you largely word processor/editor agnostic?

I use a computer. I wrote hundred of articles and three or four books on a typewriter way back when. I resisted computers, but after re-typing several book manuscripts, I opted for less drudgery.

Q: Any quirky writer behavior you’d like to reveal here for the first time ever (instantly embarrassing or endearing you to my readers?

Nothing all that quirky or endearing. I drink lots of coffee, stare out the widow a lot, talk to the cats, take long hikes on afternoons when I’m not fishing, carry a notebook at all times. I do like to work in the morning when, as a poet friend says, the mind is still informed by the non-linear dream world. I don’t know about that, but I do sometimes go to bed stuck and wake up knowing what comes next.

Q: With the rapid arrival of ebooks, have you wrangled with your publishers over things like ebook or other digital publishing issues? (e.g. some writers have rejected the 75%/25% royalty split publishers are trying to enforce on ebooks.)

I’ve sold ebook rights to some older books (that were published before such things existed) and electronic rights have been included in more recent contracts. I get slightly better than the usual split, thanks to my agent.

Q: Has the rise of digital publishing affected your writing — or the business end of things — at all?

Not that I can tell.

Q: You once said: “I happen to have fallen into this thing where I write mostly about fishing and outdoor sports but I could have gone another way.” You’re best known for your essays, but have you ever thought about branching out into fiction, or even writing a mainstream outdoor book?

I’ve written and published some sporting fiction – most thinly fictionalized accounts of real events. I’ve also written a column for the last dozen years for the Redstone Review published in Lyons, Colorado that you could describe as politics/social commentary. To write a mainstream fishing book I’d have to be an expert fisherman, which I’m not.

Q: How did you end up writing fly fishing essays — a market which supports few writers (and seems to be getting even less lucrative than in the past)?

I started out doing it just for the money while I worked on what I thought would be a career as a “serious writer” (whatever that means.) Then it just became the place where two passions came together and that was that. Also, when I started it was a more lucrative market than it is now. But it wasn’t a business decision. Anyone who takes up writing for the money is an idiot.

Q: You often mention Tom McGuane, Annie Dillard and Jim Harrison as favorite writers in part because they do very well what you’re trying to do. Who else would you recommend to your readers?

Alice Munro (new favorite), Richard Russo, Richard Ford, Scott Spencer, Larry Watson, Ernest Hemingway (the early Michigan stories and The Old Man and the Sea), John Casey, Ethan Canin, Ted Leeson, Tobias Wolff, James Galvin (The meadow), etc.

[ED: Gierach also said -- in relation to Thomas McGuane -- that: I will admit right here in print that The Longest Silence is better than anything I've written.]

Q: You’ve been in the writing business for approximately a bazillion years; what mistakes do you see younger/novice writers making over and over?

Worrying about showing how well they can write at the expense of serving the story they’re telling. The best writing is usually transparent.

Q: Any advice for other writers looking to make a dent in outdoor writing?

Beware of the Internet. If you want to make a living, you have to get paid.

Favorite Child Questions

Q: Can you point to a Gierach book (or even essay) as your favorite?

My favorite book is always the most recent one. That’s partly because it’s still fresh and partly because I’m trying to get better and want to think my most recent work should be my best.

Q: Favorite small stream fly rod?

My favorite for the last few years (ever since I got it) is a 7-foot 9-inch 4-weight bamboo made by Walter Babb of Sweetwater, Tennessee.

Q: Favorite species of trout?

Hard to pick between cutthroats and brook trout.

Q: Favorite fishing truck?

My current 2000 V-6 Nissan Frontier.

Older TU Posts Related To No Shortage of Good Days

Review of No Shortage of Good Days

Gierach on fly fishing’s class wars

Gierach on getting old

Small stream syndrome

Too cheap to pay someone to write

James Beasley is gaining a national reputation for his wonderful bamboo fly rods, which he builds in the heart of Tennessee. (Originally written for the apparently defunct Art of Angling Magazine [who didn't return my slides], this is Part Two in a two-part series)

 
James Beasley, pre-embargo cane, and notebooks from the Uslan Rod Company.

For some bamboo fly rod builders, unmet demand for their rods would be a good thing, but for James Beasley — who professed that building the same rod over and over was “very tedious” — it’s something of a curse.

Beasley – a bamboo fly rod builder in the classic mold — prefers to experiment with classic tapers, subtly altering them, preserving the best qualities of the original taper yet creating a rod better suited to modern fishermen.

I previously mentioned his much-in-demand Perfectionist and Midge tapers, but another example is his Leonard 50 DF Tournament taper — a butter-smooth, full-working 8′ 5wt with a bit more reserve power than the original.

It’s Beasley’s personal favorite rod — so loved by his customers that he rarely had one available for his own use.

As soon as he’d build a 50DF for himself, a customer would arrive, cast the thing, and beg him for the rod. Beasley would relent, sell it, and once again find himself fishing the experiments that didn’t work — until he’d get another 50DF built, when the cycle would begin anew.

Eventually, he took the extreme step of wrapping his personal 50DF in what he described as “a truly horrible thread color – just awful stuff,” and while the resulting “ugly rod” enchanted visitors with its action, the wraps “encouraged” enthusiastic buyers to wait for him to build a less-cosmetically challenged version.

If it’s one thing I like about rod builders, it’s that they’re resourceful.

Favorite Tapers

His other top sellers include a highly castable, medium-action version of the legendary Dickerson 8013, an unusual 7.5′ 6wt five-sided rod, and a handful of short Payne tapers designed to fish the nearby Tennessee and North Carolina Brookie streams.

Despite their lack of commercial appeal, he’s also dabbled in a handful of longer, more-powerful tapers. One is an 8.5′ 5wt – adapted beautifully from an original Orvis taper from the wonderful just-postwar 3-pc taper – which might just be one of the finest big water rods currently built.

The other is a strong 8.5′ 7wt based on a Payne Canadian Canoe taper. It’s a rod with enough backbone to handle summer-run steelhead yet still fishes beautifully for trout (I know because I own one), but because the bamboo rod market lies squarely with short, light rods, neither rod is likely to generate much in the way of sales.

The Beasley Canoe rod — a rare “blond” Beasley rod glued with resorcinol. (See the purple glue lines?)

When asked why he’d bother to adapt and refine tapers with little commercial appeal, his answer is simple: “I just like it. The first time I build a new taper, it seems like it doesn’t take any time at all. After that, it can get a little tedious.”

The Uslan Fly Rod Connection

Beasley’s rod shop is nestled in the woods behind his house, and it’s filled with a lot of carefully tended, well-used machines. Surveying them, Beasley jokes that “Many of the tools in my shop are antiques – just like me.”

One machine stands out from all the others; a wicked-looking assemblage that runs the length of the shop. It’s a rod-making mill from the old Uslan Rod Company, which produced bamboo fly rods in the 40s and 50s.

Uslan gained notoriety for their five-sided (pentagonal) bamboo rods, but like most high-volume bamboo companies, the Uslan Rod Company didn’t survive the advent of fiberglass rods or the cane embargo, and the mill, leftover cane and other equipment eventually found its way to Florida, where Beasley purchased it.

“It’s taken me two years to get the mill figured out” said Beasley, standing next to the huge machine and tapping it with his finger as he spoke. “It came without any instructions, so I had to discover what everything did – and what needed fixing.”

Beasley and the business end of the Uslan Rod Mill — which took two years to refurbish.

Beasley’s plan is clear; use the big commercial mill to reduce the amount of time-consuming hand-planing to just a few final passes on each strip. This preserves the hand-planed quality of his rods, but speeds production, freeing up time to experiment with new tapers.

It’s tempting to make a crack about Beasley being a mad rod scientist trapped in the body of a production rod builder, but the truth – minus the bad humor – is probably in the neighborhood of that statement.

In a bamboo fly rod market where even builders with little experience sometimes charge in excess of $1500, I wondered aloud why he doesn’t simply hike prices beyond his bargain $995 level, reduce production, and play more. After all, he’s retired, and rod building isn’t what keeps the groceries in the fridge.

To that suggestion, Beasley has a typically dry, self-effacing answer, wrapped in a big grin.

“I guess when you’re lovable but humble, you’ll never charge enough for your rods.”

(Read Part I here)

Bamboo fly rod builder James Beasley in his Crossville, TN workshop.

I first spoke to James Beasley more than 11 years ago, and his slow southern drawl and obvious love for bamboo fly rods compelled me order a bamboo fly rod from him at the end of the call. I’d heard glowing reports from Southeastern fly fishers about his interpretation of Paul Young’s highly regarded Perfectionist taper, and as I discovered when the rod was delivered only months later, the rave reviews were well founded.

By tinkering with the famous Young taper, Beasley created a rod that was slightly lighter and quicker than the original — one that was ideal for the small flies and delicate presentations which have recently come into vogue.

Despite its delicacy, the rod still had enough authority to throw long casts.

If the taper was wonderful, the rod itself was sublime. Darkly flamed and cleanly wrapped with a fiery brown, “golden butterscotch” thread, it impressed even at a distance. Up close, the cane work was clean and elegant. In all respects, it was a quality rod and an exceptional fishing tool.

Ten years later, Beasley has become widely known as a builder with a unique feel for Paul Young’s widely loved tapers, and orders for his Young interpretations now pour in. For many builders, this is the rodbuilder’s dream scenario; demand beyond the ability to meet it.

So why does Beasley see this success as both a blessing and a curse?

Beasley’s Background

A retired Methodist Minister who lives in the small town of Crossville, TN (near Nashville), James Beasley’s introduction to rod building came courtesy of cabin fever; in 1974, a long, cold winter drove him to the house of a friend where he learned to hand-plane bamboo rods.

By his own admission, his first rods were heavy and crude, but he learned from his mistakes.

“There aren’t a lot of builders around here to talk to, so I had to make all the beginner’s mistakes. I’ve got disasters hanging all around my shop,” he adds, revealing a dry, understated sense of humor that doesn’t emerge until you know him a little better.

The fact that largely trout-less rural Tennessee is far from bamboo rod building’s spiritual home in New England might have slowed Beasley’s progress, but by the early 90′s, he had become an established regional builder and developed a reputation for crafting quality rods.

The Walt Carpenter Connection

It was then Beasley met Walt Carpenter, a famous New England craftsman whose roots are deeply sunk into the history and tradition of bamboo rod building. Beasley spent a week in Carpenter’s shop, learning to build rods in the classic tradition, something that heavily influences his work today.

An 8.5 5wt Beasley bamboo rod — one of the best 8.5′ rods I’ve cast.

“I learned a lot from Walt,” he said. “What he taught me made a big difference in my rods.”

His ongoing friendship with Carpenter would prove useful when he built his first Perfectionist in the mid-90′s. “It was a very strong rod, a broomstick. You could cast 90 feet with the thing, but it was unpleasant to fish.” He experimented with the taper and consulted Walt Carpenter, whose feedback proved invaluable.

The resulting rod transmits every sensation to the hand, it’s quick without being overbearing, and lays out five feet of line with as much aplomb as 40. In short, it’s the seminal bamboo 7.5′ four weight, and it has fueled Beasley’s reputation as a wizard with Paul Young’s tapers.

Beasley has built dozens of Perfectionists over the last decade, and now has standing orders from a pair of top dealers for as many of the rods as he can produce. In addition, he’s being flooded with orders for his wonderfully refined Paul Young Midge taper and now the Driggs River model, and this popularity has become both a blessing and a curse.

To hand-craft a bamboo fly rod requires 30-50 hours of the builder’s time, so meeting orders for dozens of rods leaves little time for other projects. He’ll build a dozen Perfectionists this year, and when you add demand for the other PHY tapers – and the ongoing demand for his version of the 8′ 5wt Leonard 50DF – not a lot of experimenting gets done.

“I’m happy people like the rods as much as they do,” he says, “but it gets very tedious making the same rod over and over.”

“I would rather experiment with different tapers and techniques, and as demand grows, it gets harder to experiment. I like a challenge – I like to try something different.”

End of Part I. Stay Tuned for Part II