THE LATEST NEWS and advice on fly fishing, fly fishing gear, fly fishing trips, and fly fishing books and media.Swelled Butts and Pinned Ferrules: Choosing Cane
Bamboo's resurgence is one of those things that is hard to resist. Choose your reasons -- a re-awakening to the values of craftsmanship, a disconnect invoked by the over-the-top marketing of graphite, the Internet -- but bamboo looks like it's back to stay. More people are making bamboo rods, and more people are buying them.
For first-time cane rod buyers, there's plenty of mystery surrounding the process. Beyond exchanging axials and modulus for swelled butts and pinned ferrules, how do we even begin to evaluate the "feel" of a bamboo rod. And it seems as though every talented craftsman we know is hand-planing bamboo in his basement. With the pleasures of excess at our feet, how do we choose?
This week Zach Matthews pulls it all together for us in "Choosing Cane," an article that will bring you up to date on the options and potential pitfalls of evaluating and buying bamboo.
