This past year, my good friends & fellow rod makers Jeff Wagner & Casimira Orlowski were featured on the television program, "A Craftsmen's Legacy". Together, Jeff & Casimira make up J.D. Wagner Rodmakers. This episode featured them, their story, their rods & walks us through the basic steps of making a bamboo fly rod. It is a very well made show featuring two extremely talented rod makers.

Now, I'm biased because their friends, but Jeff & Casimira are two of the finest people you will encounter in the fly fishing business. In addition to making some of the finest rods, they also make a host of tools & sell rod building supplies. If that weren't enough, they also offer classes throughout the summer months, where they will teach you the in's & out's of making a bamboo rod from scratch.

I was very happy to see bamboo fly rods getting the spotlight on a national TV show & I was even happier to see Jeff & Casimira get some well deserved attention for their work. As ambassadors for hand-made bamboo fly rods, you can't get any better than those two!!

Below is a short preview of the episode. To watch the entire show, check out the website for A Craftsmen's Legacy.

Today's fly fishing quote comes from John Gay, a British poet who lived from 1685 to 1732. He was a self-made man, growing up in an impoverished family, eventually coming to be a contemporary of famous British writers like Swift & Pope. This quote comes from a poem he wrote titled "Rural Sports", which was published in 1713 in two small volumes - one about fishing, the other about hunting.

As spring gets closer to arriving we start to anticipate another season of trout fishing. Quotes like this one make me anxious to wet a line.
(Note: this stanza was the inspiration for the name of this blog many years ago)

"Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine,
No blood of living insect stain my line;
Let me, less cruel, cast feather'd hook,
With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook,
Silent along the mazy margin stray,
And with fur-wrought fly delude the prey."

-Jon Gay, Rural Sports, 1713

One of the things that always amazes me is how talented many fly anglers are in ways that are related to fly fishing. What I mean by that is so many of you have picked up other skills along with your fishing abilities. Some of you are fantastic fly tiers. Others are excellent writers. Some are very good photographers, while others are good with their hands making fishing accessories, & some even dabble in rod building!! The point here is that most of you take your talents & abilities & apply them in some way to the sport of fly fishing.

My good friend & fellow local fly angler Mike, is no exception. Mike is a traditional angler, to say the least. He likes old rods, old fly patterns, & I've even known him to mess with gut leaders!! Being that Mike likes the traditional aspects of our sport it comes as no surprise that he likes greenheart (wood) fly rods. Yes, that's right Mike enjoys those rods most of you have probably only read about - & he catches fish, too folks. In fact, he's very good at it.

I was blown away the other day when Mike showed me his latest project. It's an old 9 ft, 3 pc fly rod made from wooden blanks!! Yup, he went out, a few years ago, & got himself some old wooden rod blanks from the Partridge of Redditch Company (I think), back when those things were still being offered. He turned those plain wooden sticks into a beautiful, gorgeous fly rod.

As you can see, the rod features a reverse-Welles wood grip, all metal cap & ring style reel seat, & gorgeous yellow/gold silk wraps throughout. I also like the bent-wire traditional tip tops as well.

The hallmark of a skilled rod builder is in the fit & finish of all the parts & you can tell that Mike has done an excellent job with this rod. I particularly like the ever so thin winding check he made himself to fit this rod....

Wow!! Great work, Mike!!

I'm always so excited to see the things that you folks come up with related to fly fishing. I'm blown away by your talent. All of you are so creative & skilled in so many ways that it really inspires me as a rod maker to do the best work that I can.

To that end, you folks should always feel free to show me your 'extra curricular' fly fishing items with me. I'd love to see them along with your fishing photos & your stories of angling adventure. I'm often awed & inspired by the things you folks do & create - as I was when Mike showed me that fly rod!!!

I like looking at old prints, or advertising that features fly fishing as a theme. Whenever you see an old painting on a vintage magazine cover or ad, you think of Norman Rockwell. He was probably the most famous, but there were other artists working in the same style as him who were very good in their own right.

One of those artists was J.F. Kernan (1878 - 1958). Just like Rockwell, Kernan's work focused on middle-class life in America, or as he described it "the human side of outdoor sports, hunting, fishing, and dogs." He was born in Massachusetts & would attend the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston & even teach there for a while, too. His work would appear on the covers of most major magazines between the 1910's to the 1940's. His art was seen on the covers of such periodicals as The Saturday Evening Post, The Country Gentleman, Outdoor Life, & many others including different calendars & advertisements of the time.

Below are a few of his works that I really like. His sense of humor & artistic abilities really make these works enjoyable. You can almost step into these scenes yourself.   

(click on the photo for a larger image)

As with all things fly fishing, the idea of how certain fly rods may or may not hold their value can be subject to a lot of myth. We've all heard of some fly rods selling for high prices - four or five figures - so what's the deal? How is that determined?


To me, there are two ways to value a rod: one by what the market, or collectors, will pay for it; & second, what a rod is worth to you on a personal level. Ultimately a rod is just like anything else, in that it's price is determined by what the market will bear based on supply & demand. Another influence on the price of a rod is marketing, trends, & other aspects probably based on angler's emotions.


Supply & demand is an easy explanation. There are just a limited number of rods out there by famous rod makers who are no longer with us. When one of their rods comes to market, it will command higher prices because a lot of folks want the rod & there aren't very many available to buy. This is where you might see those four & five figure prices.


A rod's price to you may be completely different than what the market thinks it should be sometimes. If you have a rod that holds special meaning to you because of a personal connection - your Grandpa's old rod, one given as a special gift, etc - you wouldn't dream of parting with it at any price. If for some reason you found your Grandpa's lost old fly rod for sale somewhere, you might very well be willing to pay more than what someone else would pay for it. 


It's a fact that bamboo rods will command higher prices & hold their value more than fiberglass or graphite fly rods. Is this true for all bamboo rods? No. Again, we come back to supply & demand based on who made the rod, etc. Some graphite & fiberglass fly rods will be worth more as the years go by than some bamboo rods.


One mistake a lot of folks make is to assume that if a fly rod is made from bamboo, & if it's old, than it must be worth a lot of money. That simply isn't true. A lot of the rods made by famous past rod makers get those high prices because of the quality of their rods. That's how the got famous in the first place. A cheap, poorly made rod one hundred years ago is still a cheap, poorly made rod today. So the quality of the rod does play a large part in the price, as always.


All this is fascinating & good to know, but to me it's not my main concern in deciding what I'd pay for a rod. If you're buying fly rods based on their investment value, you may be wise with your money but to me it just kinda takes something away from the mystique of the rod. Of course, that could only be because I'm a rod maker. Plus, if you only bought rods based on their collectible value you'd miss out on a lot of good rods. Buying a bamboo rod, for example, from a living rod maker shouldn't be done in the same frame of mind that you'd buy stocks or bonds with. That rod's value may even dip a little while the rod maker is alive based on the maker's output, following, & quality of their work.


Ideally collectors would price older fly rods based on how they work as fishing instruments only. There are some high priced rods that I don't care for & others that I think are very undervalued & over looked. In the end I don't think you can ever go wrong buying a rod that you will enjoy using, no matter who made it or when.