Bamboo became a popular material for fishing rods in the late-19th century but quickly was replaced with other materials — metal and, later, fiberglass. Modern graphite is considered by many to be the ...

FREMONT -- Wes Cooper won't be fishing today, the opening day of trout fishing season. He is more likely to be in his basement shop making bamboo fly rods. Cooper, 81, has built 245 such rods since he ...

Many who fish with split-cane bamboo fly rods say they allow a depth of feeling when casting or reeling in a fish that just isn’t possible with today’s more common graphite rods. When Selah’s Kevin ...

Cost: General admission fee is $45, including meal. Attendees are allowed to fish a half-mile private stretch of the North St. Vrain Creek (Colorado fishing license required, and bring your own ...

Larry Donahe wants to slow it down. Not just life — though that as well — but the cadence of the fly cast, an already gracefully slow series of motions that allows the skilled angler, armed with rod ...

All students of fly fishing will agree that Tonkin bamboo was the superior material for building a classic fly rod, and most will concur that Tonkin bamboo was correctly named: Arundaria amabilis ...

Hunters traded nets and falcons for shotguns in pursuit of game birds some 500 years ago. Wing-shooting certainly still has its nostalgic protocols, its aesthetics, even its pretensions. But when the ...

FREMONT, MI – In the quiet of his basement workshop, Wes Cooper has been keeping a 90-year-old Michigan tradition alive - that of hand-building bamboo fly rods in an era dominated by mass-produced ...

ESKO -- When Phil Johnson was in college, making $3 an hour working summers at the paper mill in Cloquet, he saved enough to buy himself a bamboo fly rod. "I bought an Orvis Battenkill," says Johnson, ...

FLUSHING – It wasn’t so much about what we were going to catch as how we were going to catch them, said Dirk Fischbach, one of the more dedicated fly fishermen I know. That we were going to fish with ...

While Sexton said he’d love to transition to just making rods, it isn’t a reliable source of income for any small maker because it takes at least 40 hours to make each bamboo fly-fishing rod. “Here, I ...