A Fly Rod with a Soul: The Bamboo Fishing Rods and Life of E. C. Powell, Angler By Per Brandin. Published by Little Westkill Press, 2021; $98.50 for the trade edition and $250 for a deluxe slipcovered edition. Both are available only from the author at https://book.html.
By the end of the 1960s, as anglers flocked to increasingly excellent and relatively inexpensive fiberglass fly rods, split bamboo was being written off as outdated. And when graphite began to take over from glass in the late 1970s, it looked like bamboo was in the boarding area on a f light to extinction. But the material stayed alive, initially among traditionalists and older anglers who loved bamboo’s feel, but also among a growing number of mostly young bamboo rod builder/anglers who both admired and sought to improve on the work of earlier builders.
Here on the West Coast, a renaissance in bamboo rod making that began in the late 1970s was strongly influenced by the innovative thinking of two earlier Western bamboo rod makers. In 1933, Powell’s Edwin Courtney Powell and Winston’s Lew Stoner both patented hollowing processes that removed some or all of the unproductive fibers in the center of a culm of bamboo, making their rods lighter and greatly improving performance. The rods they produced became the pacemakers in casting competitions and on the West’s demanding trout and steelhead waters. Some of those Powells and Winstons are still being fished today, not to mention being sought after by collectors.
Until recently, we had no definitive examination of the story of either rod company. A book on Winston has been promised, but it looks as though it may not be forthcoming. Per Brandin’s remarkable new book, A Fly Rod with a Soul: The Bamboo Fishing Rods and Life of E. C. Powell, Angler, explores not just E. C. Powell’s life and the path he traveled in developing his rods, but the angling and casting culture from which his fly rods grew and his continuing influence on contemporary bamboo rod craftsmen, Per Brandin himself perhaps foremost among them.
Born in 1878, Powell had no formal training in engineering or design. Indeed, his first occupations were listed as beekeeper, orchardist, and railroad conductor. But he soon went to work in his family’s general-merchandise stores in Woodland, California, and later in Red Bluff and Marysville, all of which carried some fishing gear. He married in his late twenties, divorced, remarried, and with his second wife, Myrtle, raised a large family. He also became more involved in the fishing-tackle business.
Above all else, Powell was an ardent and highly skilled angler with an intuitive feel for what made a good fly rod. Not surprisingly, he was dissatisfied with the fly rods then available and figured he could do better. He built his first rod in 1910 with only rudimentary tools and soon began offering them for sale through the family store, improving them and his tooling as he went along.
Sometime in the late 1920s, he had the idea that a rod could be made lighter and better by removing the material that lies beneath bamboo’s hard outer fibers. What
he did then was laminate just those outer fibers to a lighter species of wood — he first used sugar pine, then Port Orford cedar — before shaping the strips from which the rod was constructed. Moving on, he reasoned that he could improve his rods even more by scalloping away some of the cedar core, leaving adequate bamboo wall thickness, along with solid dams between the scallops to provide gluing surface and hoop strength. If you look at an E. C. Powell rod shaft that’s been cut to expose the interior, you see a series of hollow troughs along the length, with solid sections of an inch or so between them. And while he continued to build some rods with full cedar cores, it’s Powell’s “semihollow” fly rods that are his hallmarks. He patented the process in 1933, and the patent number — 1,932,986 — is frequently the only writing on a semi-hollow E. C. Powell fly rod.
Like Winston, who also patented a hollowing technique, Powell made rods that frequently were the winning rod in the casting competitions that were popular then, where Powell and his sons were regular competitors. Unlike Winston, who hollowed only in the butt sections, Powell hollowed through most of the tip, as well. While never as cosmetically perfect in finish as many Eastern brands, semi-hollow E. C. Powells feel surprisingly light and lively for their length and are generally superior casters.
Brandin makes clear that what Powell wanted from a f ly rod was what he called “true unity of action” for a given application. Just as important as Powell’s ideas on rod construction were his ideas on rod action and the tapers that established it. He built relatively fast “A-taper” rods with light tips and strong butts where the rate of gain in rod diameter increased down the length of the rod. His “C-taper” rods were the opposite of these, with the rod diameter increasing at a declining rate. The result was a rod with a relatively stronger tip and softer butt that could pick up and cast the heavy sinking lines and flies used by steelhead anglers and the large bugs used in bass fishing. His “B-taper” rods were generalists, with a constant rate of gain in diameter. And of course, there were variations among taper families: B-taper rods of different steady increases in diameter, C-taper and A-taper rods where the gain or loss in diameter was greater or lesser than other models, and occasional mixes, such as an A-taper butt and C-taper tip or a B-taper butt and an A-taper tip.
Some E. C. Powell models were produced for tournament casting, but most were built for, bought, and used hard by serious anglers. They’re mostly long rods of 9 to 9-1/2 feet, intended for large Western rivers, though shorter rods are out there. When my father drove up to Marysville to order an 8-1/2-foot Powell trout rod in 1940, E. C. told him that was “a woman’s rod” and got him to change to a 9-footer. That rod, now mine, is as much a sweetheart with a double-taper 5-weight floating line as any rod I’ve cast.
Not only were Powell’s construction techniques and taper ideas his own, but so was his tooling. Instead of tapering sections with the sort of mill used by most other builders, which cut a 60-degree angle on each strip in one pass, Powell made his sections with multiple cuts on a table saw of his own invention. Family members and, later, a few employees, mounted reel seats and grips and wrapped the rods in the shop next to the Powell Marysville home. It was labor-intensive work doing the laminating and hollowing, but Powell’s goal was to create the best rod he could, and only rarely did he substitute speedier procedures for those he’d developed and tested, even when a change would have decreased costs. Prior to the end of World War II, for example, blanks got a multicoat hand-rubbed oil finish before wraps were coated with a nitrocellulose lacquer. Powell switched to a speedier, hand-applied varnish only when demand increased significantly after the war. That’s a highly abbreviated look at what Powell did back then. It’s what Brandin does exploring and detailing the E. C. Powell story that deserves our kudos here today. He examines and describes the technical arcana of Powell tapers and construction techniques at a level of detail that even the fussiest rod maker or collector will find helpful. He discusses differences in hook keeper styles, the differences in reel seats over the years, how rods built in the Powell shop by E. C.’s son Buzz differed from E. C.’s own rods, and how rods built by Tony Maslan, E. C.’s son-in-law, who bought the business from him, both maintained Powell’s standards and changed the rods slightly over the years. There’s even a section on the contemporary silk threads that restorers might try in lieu of the no-longer-available thread that E. C. used. The book is also the story of Powell’s relationships with family members, of his connections with the West’s premier anglers and casters, with other builders, such as Max Yerxa, with his son Walton Powell, and even with Winston’s Doug Merrick, who hand picked a Powell rod that he won at a casting competition. Brandin also explores Powell’s influence on the work of contemporary bamboo rod makers such as Mario Wojnicki, Jim Reams, and Per Brandin himself, with a short and interesting chapter where Per imagines a conversation with E. C. about his ideas.
The relationship between anglers and their fly rods can be as uncomplicated as that between Olive Garden diners and their forks. For those of us on the other end of the spectrum, Brandin’s book will become an essential part of our libraries. Writing in a voice that’s both authoritative and accessible, Brandin leads his audience through the book’s topics, and the effect is like taking a museum tour with a particularly well-organized and eloquent guide. The book is as handsome as the Powell story is well told, 240 silky pages, hardbound between heavy 9-by-12-inch covers. Hundreds of historical and contemporary photographs and illustrations are deftly placed to support and enhance the text. My only regret is that it may shine such a light on E. C. Powell’s rods that prices for used rods will increase beyond where they stand today. There are a couple more I’d like to acquire before things get silly.
— Larry Kenney
Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon
By Monte Burke. Published by Pegasus Books, 2020; $26.95 hardbound.
Why fly fish? We’ve all explained it to the curious and justified it to the skeptical, and a whole genre of fly-fishing literature is devoted to uneffing the ineffable appeal of the sport and unscrewing the inscrutable qualities of its pleasures. The most common explanation is that people fly fish to catch fish, yes, but that is only part of the reason. Most of all, people fly fish because they have fun doing it — it’s simple and complicated at the same time, not like dunking worms. Also, it’s relaxing, a respite from the pressures of daily life, and it’s a form of healthy exercise that takes you to beautiful places around the country and around the world. Plus, unlike many sports, fly fishing doesn’t inherently involve competition. All those qualities tend to attract people whom it’s a pleasure to know and to be around, even though the sport is basically an individual affair, and seeking and finding solitude in nature is another of its basic pleasures. Fly fishers tend to be mellow, pleasant people.
But then there are the tarpon anglers chasing fly-fishing world records out of Homosassa, Florida, starting in the 1970s, who are at the center of Monte Burke’s Lords of the Fly. Some are boldface names, at least in fly-fishing circles, such as Stu Apte, and Billy Pate, Jr. Others you probably haven’t heard of, men (they are all men) with the wealth and the time and the obsession — the “madness” in Burke’s title — to pursue not just any world record, but a world record for tarpon, the huge and difficult-to catch relative of the herring. (Records exist for a multitude of species, but what glory is there in catching a world-record bluegill?) These are joined for a while by counterculture types, the writers and artists Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Guy Valdène, Russell Chatham, and Richard Brautigan, curious about the scene, but eventually repelled by it. In later years, they are succeeded by other colorful characters, including a mob boss, Bobby Erra, and are accompanied by the guides who poled their boats, found them fish, and served as partners in their quests. As Monte Burke tells it, at the center of this story is Tom Evans, now a retired Wall Streeter and Fox News devotee, who has been chasing world-record tarpon at Homosassa since the early days of the fishery and who has held and lost several tippet-class records.
For Burke, fly fishing “is about stories” — those we tell ourselves about it, those we tell others, and those in which we use it as metaphor or allegory to get at something bigger. Bragging rights as world-record holder are the least of the stories involved here. These vivid characters and others who come and go over the years supply Burke with the material for an epic narrative in which egos clash, the claim that fly fishing is better than sex is put to the test, substances legal and illegal are consumed, and not just marriages, but lives are broken. In the hands of even a mediocre writer, these would have appeal, but Burke is a skilled storyteller who is able to make a tale about people who fish for tarpon on the fly into a larger story about our time, its history, and our future.
For these men obsessed with catching a world record, none of the aspects of the usual explanation of why people fly fish apply. Tarpon flats aren’t particularly beautiful, tarpon fishing is not at all relaxing (boredom is endemic, and blown shots and lost fish are common), and although fighting a tarpon certainly counts as exercise — a fight can last for hours (Billy Pate once had a fish on for 12 hours and lost it) — it can be downright crippling.
It also is by definition competitive. To set a world record is to outdo someone else who has set a world record, even if that someone is you. It is not fun. It is a zero-sum game. “The easiest part for me was financial,” Evans says. “The physical part was tough, but I could handle it. The mental part was the worst. The mental stamina you needed to keep going after it, year after year, when nothing happened, the concentration, the pressure, the fear . . . that point you reach where you can no longer rely on any excuses for failure.” If you’re not winning, you’re losing.
So if this kind of fly fishing is not fun, what is it? One answer, Burke notes, is that tarpon fishing for world records still shares something with fishing for small brook trout in a mountain stream: a kind of atavism that is the legacy of the hunter-gatherer past of the human species. Something just feels right about being on the hunt, even if you do not intend to kill or even harm anything, and that something is a part of humans’ relation to nature, just as much as any transcendental feeling of spiritual oneness.
However, there’s more to the motivation of these anglers than that, because they are hunting not just tarpon, but records. What’s central is not a relation with nature, but a relation with other people — other very competitive people. And this is where the trouble begins.
“The quest was all about ego,” one record-hunter said, after he had abandoned it, and not just about ego as healthy sense of self, but ego on steroids, especially among the early group of Homosassa anglers.
“Modesty has never been one of Apte’s strong suits,” Burke writes. “For many years, he had an RV that had an enormous picture of his face on the side, under which was written in large letters, stu apte, world’s greatest fly fisherman.” One of the other record seekers sought to outfish others by sending up a helicopter to scout for tarpon — he could afford it, and he didn’t care what others thought about it. Pate was a relentless self-promoter and had a nasty relationship with other record-holders, including Evans. Many had long-term associations with the guides who brought them their records, only to break with them because the anglers behaved so badly. Fly fishers may tend to be mellow, pleasant people, but these are not — which is what makes the stories Burke tells about them so compelling. Conflict is one of the things that makes stories work.
But so does change, and that’s part of the story Burke has to tell, too — part, also, of its larger dimensions. Harrison, McGuane, Valdène, Chatham, and Brautigan fished Homosassa during the early days, but never were in it for the ego trip and went on to do other things. Burke compares the early fishery to Manhattan’s SoHo: the creative artists saw its potential, but moved away when what was hip was taken over by those with money and other priorities. Evans may have returned every year, but the rest of the original crowd has passed on to other pursuits or just passed on, and the generations that followed them have been less driven by competitive egos. David Mangum, one of the current generation of Florida guides, “abhors fishing for world records,” Burke writes. “ ‘I think all of those guys who are going after records are doing it just to get their dicks in a book,’ he says. ‘They just want to be remembered when they’re dead. I don’t care about getting my name in a book.’” For Mangum, Burke says, it’s “all about the experience of the here and now.”
That says something about not just changes in the sport of f ly fishing, but changes in American culture. That egodriven competition is beneficial is a premise of our economic system, but it is both honored inconsistently and often applied in domains where competition does more harm than good. Not all — even not many — human relations are zero-sum games. The pathos at the center of the stories that Burke tells is that in the game these anglers were playing, in the end, everyone is a loser. The cliché that records are made to be broken represents as an incentive the reality that any such achievement is temporary and doomed to be exceeded. The result, as exemplified by the story of Tom Evans in Burke’s book, is an echo of the myth of Sisyphus — the repetition of thwarted efforts and unending frustration.
Anglers concerned not with records, but the experience of the here and now embrace a different ethos, one that is based on their relationship with nature, not with other people — one that puts our relations with each other and the consequences of our own actions in perspective. Among the changes that
Burke chronicles is the decline of the Homosassa tarpon fishery, and the reasons for it are directly linked, via the reduced flows in the rivers that feed into the bay at Homosassa, to the exhaustion of aquifers throughout Florida and thus to “ill-thought-out development, boughtand-paid-for politicians . . . the unsustainable development of coastal lands . . . intentional misinformation, the worshipping of economic progress above all other types of progress . . . a harbinger of worse things to come.”
Flip Pallot is one among the boldface names who sampled the Homosassa fishery during its heyday and was put off by the scene that developed there. Burke quotes him as worrying that “my generation didn’t do a good enough job of preserving it and of helping the next generation to do so. I wish we’d done better.” Lords of the Flies tells a lot of engaging stories, and it’s a fun read, but it also challenges us to take responsibility for the stories that will be told about the kind of people we were and what we did as anglers and stewards of the environment. In those stories, who we are will be what we do.
— Bud Bynack
