Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Sweetness and light
Since the 1880s the most enjoyable rods to fish with have been made from split cane so why don’t we all use them, wonders Edward Barder
Away from the water, you probably don’t assemble your favourite rod and swish it about. It’s unlikely you’ll have seen it since the last time you fished. It’s a good one and it cost the best part of £900. It was designed by the best in the business, weighs nothing, doesn’t require any maintenance and casts effortlessly. It’s not especially interesting to look at but who cares — it’s the quality of the fishing that really matters, not the tackle, surely.
While most fishing is done with superb, affordable carbon-fibre rods, a stubborn minority appear to think that fishing with split cane places them in a more sensitive, poetic milieu. Are they rather fey eccentrics, these cane lovers, or is there some real substance behind the enduring appeal of these rods?
It’s worth noting that America’s most engaging, thoughtful and popular fly-fishing writer, John Gierach, is a devotee of split cane.
Here, Chris Yates, regarded by many as the finest writer about angling in the modern age, is also a lifelong cane advocate. When angling and its paraphernalia is depicted in art — Robin Armstrong comes to mind— it’s always a cane rod that the angler is using or that lies on the bank next to the catch.
So what is it that some of us find so appealing about fishing with a rod made from a variety of giant grass cultivated on a windy hillside in an obscure region of rural China? Why should we bother to invest in the defining instrument of our sport if its manufacture and materials haven’t altered for more than a century?
Partly, it’s a matter of aesthetics — that irrational package of emotions that draws the eye to English and Scottish shotguns, the Aston Martin
DB6 Superleggera, the Taj Mahal and Johannes Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine. We instinctively appreciate their lifeaffirming qualities.
This visual, emotional tug isn’t enough, though. The thing’s got to work properly. You wouldn’t want to spoil a potentially fabulous day on the water for the sake of using a rod that looks lovely but casts about as well as a length of spaghetti. And this is the thing about split-cane rods. At their best, they can perform quite brilliantly. I’ll go further; from 6ft
6in to 8ft 6in in length — split cane’s
“In sporting art, it’s always a cane rod that the angler is using or that lies on the bank”
sweet spot — the very best of these rods are peerless.
The solid hexagonal form of a cane rod resists bending, so when flexed during casting or playing a fish, it transmits a great deal of information to the angler’s hand. A cane rod
loads under its own weight and requires less effort to make a cast at close range. When made really well to a tried-and-tested taper design, these rods are superb tools. They’ll do everything carbon fibre can in a subtly different way, with that added aesthetic dimension.
So why doesn’t everybody use one? In a nutshell, outstanding split-cane rods are elusive and it’s not easy to guarantee that the one you buy is going to have the magic.
Refinement
From the 1880s to the early 1960s, most fishing rods were made from split cane — certainly all the really good ones. For this, we have the Americans to thank. In particular, a man called Hiram Lewis Leonard of Maine — engineer, gunsmith and violin maker. He didn’t actually invent the split-cane rod but he did bring its manufacture to a level of refinement that remains unsurpassed.
The only significant changes made to Leonard’s methods are the use of waterproof glues and casting actions that suit our fishing methods and stretchy plastic fly lines.
Before Leonard’s time, rods had been made from a variety of timbers and whole bamboo. They were often beautiful, but heavy and unreliable. Rod makers were well aware that bamboo was the strongest and lightest material of all, but rods made from it could only reflect what nature had provided in terms of taper and therefore action.
Inevitably, someone worked out that bamboo could be deconstructed, reworked to specific dimensions and reassembled in a new form that retained its inherent strength and
“Rods made from whole bamboo were often beautiful, but heavy and unreliable”
lightness. This involved splitting a bamboo pole into strips that were triangular in cross-section and precisely tapered. These strips were glued together to form a solid rod section with dimensions determined by the rod maker, not by nature.
By the 1870s, Leonard had settled on a format of six strips with equilateral triangular cross-sections bonded with the bamboo’s densest, strongest fibres on the outside, to make a hexagonal solid rod of impressive strength and lightness.
Word soon reached the British angling fraternity that these rods made from split bamboo were vastly superior to anything else. By the early 1880s, our tackle makers were producing split cane of their own in significant quantities.
Split-cane rods can be superb to fish with — good enough for G E M Skues, Frederic Halford, Roderick Haig-brown, Chris Yates and John Gierach — and I’ve yet to meet anyone who hasn’t liked the look of a cane rod. So what happened? The sad answer was fibreglass. When the US imposed a trade embargo on China in 1949, imports of essential bamboo ceased. The US tackle trade had already spotted the potential of fibreglass and dwindling stocks of bamboo hastened its development.
Here was a readily available, inert, man-made material that could quickly and easily be made into rods that were light, durable and functional. The artisans who had fashioned bamboo were retiring, and most of the old firms either closed their doors or adapted to fibreglass. Where the US led, we followed. By the early 1970s, the split-cane rod was at
risk of extinction, fibreglass was used by everyone and carbon fibre was about to make an appearance.
Novelty wears off, though, and by the time carbon was installed as the mass production material of choice, split cane began to enjoy a renaissance. In America, Orvis and Winston hadn’t given up on bamboo, and Thomas & Thomas had bravely started making lovely cane rods in 1970. In 1977 the first edition of A Master’s Guide To Building a Bamboo Fly Rod was published, Hoagy B Carmichael’s weighty masterpiece about the rod-making genius Everett Garrison. Still in print, it was the catalyst for a worldwide renaissance in artisan split-cane rod making.
Powerful
Carbon had certainly made fishing a great deal easier and more enjoyable in all branches of the sport where long, powerful rods were required. But for an increasing number of us, whether it was for a spot of traditional carp fishing or a day on a river after trout, a good split-cane rod seemed the right thing to use.
As a boy my bedroom sprouted a strange forest of rods. Some were pretty good but I didn’t form a strong attachment to any of them. My father had some split-cane rods, though, and it was these that my brother and I squabbled over when we fished as a family. They weren’t especially good ones, but they had a certain indefinable character, classiness even, and to our young eyes they just looked nicer than the brown and yellow fibreglass jobs they sat next to on the bank.
They had a completely different feel too — a lively heft, unlike fibreglass, which felt of nothing.
When they were flexed in the hand, they said something to me, even though I didn’t understand exactly what. I became a split-cane devotee almost as soon as I knew that fishing was the sport for me.
In my late teens a tragedy occurred that was to change my life. I broke the top section of my father’s Milward’s Floatrover. To my great relief he wasn’t angry with me because this rod’s top had broken before. It was prone to it, he said, and suggested that because I was good with my hands, I might try to repair it.
This incident led to an interest in amateur rod making. After a few years, I found myself in the fishing tackle trade. My hobby was noticed and I received commissions. Thirty years ago, aged 25, I abandoned the security of regular employment and making split-cane rods became my sole occupation.
If Milward’s had made a better job of its rather mediocre Floatrover, I might have had a different career, perhaps even a different life. But I think I’d still be one of those lucky anglers who’s discovered that you really do catch a better class of fish with a split-cane rod.