Bamboo Rods: A Blast from the Past

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that as an angler I’m a bit nostalgic about America’s fly fishing past–its origins, places, pioneers, personalities, and equipment, including the oft-forgotten bamboo fly rod.

More than that, I really wanted to fish with one of these storied rods; and even more than that, I wanted to go one-on-one with a wild trout with a bamboo rod and a dry fly in a small stream–and bring it to the net.

How’s that for being specific?!

My interest in this was only spurred on by a recent visit to the National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg, Virginia, which has a terrific rare fly fishing book collection, including Izaak Walton’s and Charles Cotton’s Compleat Angler.

My bamboo fishing dream started to come together last winter. While checking out booths and catching up with fly fishing friends at the Virginia Fly Fishing Festival, I spied a Virginia vendor who was offering hand-made bamboo fly rods for sale.

I wasn’t in the market for a bamboo rod, but I approached the booth.

I struck up a conversation with Chris Sparkman, a retired Virginia high school math teacher, who makes bamboo fly rods from scratch and runs Sparchimedes Fly Rods in Woodbridge, Virginia.

Before you ask: “Sparchimedes” is a derivation of “Sparkman” and “Archimedes,” the Greek mathematician…get it?

Anyway, besides making rods, I was also pleased to hear that Chris is a big supporter of Project Healing Waters (PHW), a program that teaches the art of fly fishing to veterans in need of healing, resulting from their military service.

Chris runs the rod-building program at the PHW-Fort Belvoir chapter, where participants build their own (graphite) rods from blanks. As a Navy veteran myself, and the father of a still-serving Army officer, that’s a huge up-check in my logbook.

After admiring some beautiful examples of Chris’ artistry, I moved on.

A few months later, I contacted Chris and asked if he might be interested in taking me through the “making” (not “building” as I came to learn…) of a bamboo rod. He agreed and invited me to his home to see his basement workshop.

What struck me upon entering the workshop was not only the number of strips of bamboo adorning the rafters but the big whiteboard with mathematical formulas that assist Chris build five-sided bamboo fly rods.

Chris believes that the pentagonal (5-strip) bamboo fly rod has several advantages over the traditional hexagonal (6-strip) fly rod, including sensitivity, softness, weight, power, and accuracy, among others.

After the tour, we headed to the lawn to cast some of his handiwork. Duly impressed with the casting capability of these rods, especially the super flexible rod tip section, I asked if we could get onto the water at some point to fish one of them.

He was off soon to Alaska to fish for salmon with–what else?!–a bamboo fly rod, so we made plans to get together in the fall to fish. We were able to meet on a Shenandoah Valley stream recently with some PHW–Fort Belvoir warriors.

The fishing started slow after a big drop in temperature to below freezing the night before. Chris planned to only fish dry flies, while I started with a dry-dropper. Chris started to get some strikes on the dry–and I quickly changed flies.

I soon caught a wild rainbow parr on a dry, and while the five-weight bamboo rod casted like a dream, the fish’s small size didn’t give me a full sense of the rod, especially the feel of playing a more substantive trout.

My luck would rapidly change when a good-sized bow rose to my dry fly in some riffles. It missed the fly, but fortunately didn’t get stung by the hook. I casted again, running the fly over where the trout had risen.

The bow came up again, opening wide, exposing the fluorescent white lining of its mouth. This time, I set the hook too quickly, pulling the fly out of its reach. I still didn’t think it felt any of the hook yet and since it seemed interested in eating, in again I went.

It hit the fly this time, and I set the hook. Fish on!

The near-fulfillment of one of my fly fishing fantasies, I really wanted to land this trout. I worried about how the bamboo rod would respond in fighting a decent fish. The wild rainbow jumped six-times to throw the hook and each time I held my breath, thinking it would break off the light 5x tippet.

But no worries, the flexible tip of the bamboo rod easily absorbed the shock of the fish’s acrobatics. It felt nothing like what I would’ve expected from a modern rod. The fish was easily brought out of the current and into the net to a series of fist bumps.

Check that “bad boy” off the bucket list.

Another highlight of the catch for me was the presence of my youngest son, Jack, who took time off from his high school basketball pursuits to come along and play “net-boy” and paparazzo.

Jack did a great job with the lens, but I think I got as many pictures of stream-side cattle, which were strangely interested in our bamboo angling, as pictures of our day fishing. That’s OK–another father-son bonding moment we’re sure to treasure.

Enough on bovines, back to bamboo….

The bamboo rod is clearly different from the modern fly rod. The craftsmanship is classic; the makers of these beautiful rods are artisans. Not surprisingly, a bamboo rod takes between 80-100 hours to make.

With modern adhesives and coatings, they’re durable–and strong.

While my experience with these rods is limited, they do have a distinct feel. Some say that bamboo is more “alive” than rods made with other modern materials and, as such, better connect the fisher to the fly.

I think that may be right.

Don’t get me wrong, I love modern fly rods, but for me, fishing with a bamboo rod for wild trout on a small Virginia stream with dry flies felt like stepping back in time, happily clinch-knotting me to the incredible heritage of this great outdoor sport.

Dr. Peter Brookes is an award-winning outdoor writer from Virginia. BrookesOutdoors@aol.com