14 posts tagged bamboo fly rod

Bamboo Fly Rods - A Timeless Tradition May 12th, 2008 You have probably seen or used bamboo fly rods if you know a fly-fisherman or if you are a fly- fisherman. In a throw-back to a simpler time, bamboo fly rods are still just as popular today as they were a hundred years ago.

Last night I was drenched in a twilight lullaby.  The hum of that first river.    The first wading step into a forever.   Wading into a forever that soaks.   A forever that saturates.  A forever that cannot dry out, will not. Not a forever that fades and falls or a kind of forever ago.   But an inseparable forever after.

The words “big trout” excite the fly fishermen’s nervous system, and in a way that’s all out of proportion to their value in terms of calories. You start wondering about things like that, and the next thing you know you’re digging through texts about the psychology of our hunter-gatherer forebearers,

The L&T Nancy is back from her weeklong trip, which basically means it’s time to stop gouging dinner directly from the peanut butter jar. Yes Undergrounders, the influences of the much better half are already being felt, though a fishing trip with cave men fly buddies Dave Roberts and Chris Raine doesn’t exactly reinforce most civilized behavior.

The reports about the Upper Sacramento have been uniform; it’s tough sledding right now, even if you stumble across a decent hatch. Of course, something’s always happening somewhere — a lesson I learned in my bass fishing days, where boat after boat would return to the dock with empty livewells, but somebody always hammered the fish.

Fly fishing for bluegill isn’t as sexy as sight fishing for tarpon — and it’s hard to reasonably perform a lot of fist pumps and layer a rock music soundtrack over your average bluegill footage — but damn, they’re fun. Fly fishing for bluegill. The fish are small, but the color’s big.

The Upper Sacramento’s flows are yo-yoing up and down, and we’ve entered the stage of winter where uncertainty turns fly fishing into a local’s game. The flows ran well over 6,000 cfs after last weekend’s warm storm, and while they’re down below 3,000 cfs, we’ve still got a lot of low-altitude snow just itching to melt.

I'll bet the Swedish knife manufacturer didn't see this one coming. At first it was hard, then you figured it out and began to think it's easy. A bad mistake, as the split starts to wander with your mind. Trick is to bend the wider side.

Sometimes winter fishing is great drama. Other times, you get in the drift boat and just soak up the sun, which feels pretty damned good in the middle of a snowy winter. I won’t cop to being lazy as much as relaxed; I sporadically fished a dry fly but Dave Roberts and I were both looking for the midday hatches; BWOs early with a chance for some March Browns later.

What I didn’t know was that the hobby of making bamboo fly rods is such a social activity. Much of the work is done alone, but a lot more time is spent talking with fellow rod makers, 3-years-old daughter who wants a pink fly rod, 5-year-old son who wants a rod longer than his dad has, workmates, friends, and, well, just about everybody willing to listen.