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 ...

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 ...

Get any of our free daily email newsletters — news headlines, opinion, e-edition, obituaries and more. Bill Blackburn’s father bought him his first fly rod at Bargaintown in Manheim, Pa., in 1958. It ...

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 ...

Nothing, but nothing, casts quite like a handcrafted bamboo fly rod — not fiberglass, not graphite, nor any of the other space-age, cooked-up-in-a-laboratory, man-made, plastic resin composites. Got ...

The words leave his lips as though he has spoken them a thousand times before, yet resonate here among the culms of bamboo, ancient rod-building machinery and photos of legendary fish from a lost time ...

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 ...

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, ...

I'm getting anxious now. Tom Smithwick, who moved to Shippensburg several years ago, builds bamboo fly rods. A couple weeks ago, he found three bamboo rod blanks and offered to help me build out a fly ...

LANESBORO, Minn. — Steve Sobieniak knew what a good fly fishing rod felt like. He developed a feel for the graceful casting tool, particularly ones made of bamboo. He could pick one up, hold it, test ...

Get any of our free daily email newsletters — news headlines, opinion, e-edition, obituaries and more. TWIN BRIDGES - Glenn Brackett will describe the act of building split bamboo fly rods as "a ...

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 ...