Of Fly Rods and Their Makers

I’ve never been a collector of fishing tackle. I’m too practical, plus I’m happy enough with the basics. In the past 20 years, I’ve bought only three fly rods and two reels and still use them all. Yet I don’t begrudge my friends who think differently and can’t resist the temptation to acquire the latest in angling technology. One friend specializes in rods and has a custom-built rack in his garage to house them. He owns a Spey rod and a rod for Euro nymphing, a vintage split-cane number and a tenkara rod. If you express an interest, he’ll explain why high-density fiber positioning can improve the quality of a rod.

Fly rods weren’t always so diverse. They didn’t exist as such until the eighteenth century. Before then, anglers in Britain, where fly fishing first developed as a sport, relied on multipurpose rods meant for bait, lures, or f lies. The rods were very long, between 15 and 20 feet, with the line fixed at the tip, limiting the amount of water to be covered. They could be purchased only in big cities — the rest were homemade. Hazel was the wood of choice, relatively light, although not flexible enough at the tip. Instead, anglers fashioned a tip section from a shoot of blackthorn or crab tree, then added a tapered piece of whalebone. Whalebone is elastic and sensitive, but also heavy. Its weight was its sole drawback.

Casting with these cumbersome rods wasn’t easy, especially when fishing upstream. Most anglers didn’t bother with that — dries weren’t yet in general use — and stuck to the traditional downstream methods. We know as much from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. The first true rods for fly fishing alone appeared in the 1700s. Builders had many more materials at their disposal. A fairly standard rod of the period might consist of an ash butt, a hazel midsection, and a section of yew with a whalebone tip. A few rods made of “bambou cane” from India belonged to wealthy salmon anglers. Reels were advertised as “winches,” often of brass. The small brass gears were too soft, though, to handle the stress of a strong fighting fish and gave way.

But the most significant advance in design was the inclusion of rod rings to guide and help control the line. Previously, rods had only a single ring at the tip. The rings were forged from iron and hammered into the wood — primitive, but effective. Now anglers could cast more accurately and do a better job of playing a fish, but their rough horsehair lines often snagged in the rings.

As fly fishing’s popularity grew, tackle dealers sprouted up. John Margrave’s shop could be found near the Swan pub in Golding Lane, London, while John Stubbs traded among the booksellers by The Three Trouts in St. Paul’s churchyard. The famous Onesimus Ustonson opened for business in the 1760s and outfitted King George IV. Custom rods now cost a small fortune. A gent named Bainbridge once engaged the services of Henry Swann, who built him a five-piece rod with screw joints at each ferrule. It came with an extra tip section and cost 18 shillings. Long, two-handed rods were still the norm. They were more powerful than single-handed rods and allowed for a higher back cast to avoid hooking branches and shrubs.

Hazel fell from favor in the 1800s. Rod makers replaced it with lancewood, a member of the custard-tree family. The lancewood came from the West Indies and British Guiana; it was ideal for small joints and rod tips. Aesthetics had begun to matter, and lancewood looked elegant when polished. Rosewood from Brazil figured to a lesser extent, but rod rings were still a problem to be solved. Often, the mounting proved unreliable, and the rings pulled loose when a fish was on – an angler’s nightmare. The wooden joints of a rod were also a worry. If they got wet, they swelled up and jammed. Serviceable rods with metal ferrules were still a distant dream. Builders tried brass, but the finely made ferrules were too weak and the strong ones too heavy. Both tended to snap off under pressure.

By the 1850s, profound changes were in the wind. Among the leaders was William Stewart, an advocate of upstream fishing, who published The Practical Angler in 1857. Stewart believed that rods for trout had become far too pliable, limiting the distance a fly fisher could cast. The action of some rods was so soft that the tip could be bent to touch the butt. (Whalebone tips were fast disappearing in favor of cane and greenheart.) Stewart lobbied for lighter single-handed rods much shorter than those in current use — as short as five or six feet. A few such rods were around, though they weren’t common. Henry Wade of the Wear Valley Anglers fished one that weighed only five and a half ounces. That had less to do with Stewart’s lobbying than the fact that Wade had only one arm.


The market for fly rods in America began to heat up. Instead of hazel or hickory, the builders preferred native woods such as hornbeam, cedar, barberry, and snakewood. You could buy a cheap rod for five bucks or a beauty for fifty. But when bamboo became widely available, it revolutionized the industry. At first, bamboo rods consisted of a single, unsplit piece. Such rods proved too stiff and heavy, so the wood was later split into canes, as the Chinese had been doing for centuries. It’s believed that Samuel Phillippe, a gunsmith in Easton, Pennsylvania, invented the split-cane rod. His earliest version, an 11-footer of three cane strips, weighed only eight ounces, but it was difficult to cast accurately. That held true for Phillppe’s four-strip and five-strip models, as well. His most successful version, offered for sale in 1849, used six cane strips and fished so well it evolved into the standard by the mid-1870s.

A trout angler in 1900 generally relied on a single-handed split-cane rod between 9 feet 6 inches and 11 feet long. Experts thought little could be done to improve the design, though builders couldn’t help but tinker. The hollow-built rod was an example. It involved paring away part of the bamboo pith to reduce the mass and make the rod even lighter. That sounded good, but the balance was hard to get right. In 1933, Lew Stoner built a hollow rod for R. L. Winston, and Dick Miller used one to cast 183 feet in a tournament, still an amazing distance. Cork handles were another innovation of the era, one that’s never been bettered.

A handful of rod makers in the 1930s played around with tubular steel. “I am convinced the steel trout rod is the rod of the future,” wrote one, suggesting it would improve life for anglers, just as steel shafts on golf clubs had helped golfers with their games. But steel paled in comparison with fiberglass as a material for rods. Shakespeare started selling fiberglass models in 1946 — perfect timing, since China slapped an embargo on the importing of Tonkin cane to the United States shortly after. That led to the slow decline of split-cane rods except as a luxury item. By 1978, nearly 100 per cent of American fly rods were fiberglass.

Another revolution in rod building loomed on the horizon, thanks to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a British research body. Scientists there discovered a promising new material for planes called carbon fiber, later known as graphite. An angler on staff sent some samples to Hardy, and the firm introduced its first graphite rods in the mid-1970s, around the same time Orvis and Fenwick launched their graphite lines. (There’s an ongoing argument about which company really came first, each competing as bars do to claim the first version of Irish coffee.) The rods were an instant hit, stiffer and much lighter than fiberglass or split cane.

I have two graphite rods, each an excellent angling tool. My third rod is an old split cane I grabbed at a flea market. It’s too battered to fish anymore, but I like to wave it around sometimes, because I enjoy the feel of it. Where rod design will take us next is an open question. The only certainty is that more innovation is inevitable. Somewhere a rod maker is already tinkering with the future.

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