Writing

I just hung up the phone after a lengthy conversation with bamboo fly rod builder James Beasley, and I realized I haven’t been talking to enough rod builders lately.

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.