Lesson 6: The schools of design

Bamboo School · Lesson 6 of 12 · about 6 minutes

Builds on: Short Course Lesson 2 (the five makers whose tapers we build). Here's where they fit in the bigger picture.

In the Short Course you met five makers and the rods built to their tapers. One at a time, they look like five separate stories. They aren't. Each one grew out of a regional way of building, shaped by the water near the shop and the fishing people did there.

Knowing those schools is useful. When someone hands you an unfamiliar rod and says "it's a Catskill rod" or "that's a western taper," you'll have a fair idea what it will do before you cast it.

These are broad strokes. Makers borrowed from each other, moved around and broke their own rules. But the patterns are real.

Leonard and the six-strip rod

Start in the East, with H.L. Leonard. He built rods in the 1800s in Bangor, Maine, and later in Central Valley, New York. He's widely credited with popularizing the six-strip rod, the hexagon that every rod in this course is built on.

That matters more than it sounds. Makers of that era tried other strip counts and other ways of putting cane together. The six-strip rod won out because it bends evenly in every direction, with power fibers on every face.

Leonard's shop also trained men who went on to build rods of their own, and much of the Catskill tradition traces back to that bench. One shop, a handful of apprentices, and a way of building that spread along the eastern rivers.

The Leonard 49 is coming to the lineup.

The Catskill school

The Catskill rivers are where American dry-fly fishing grew up. Clear water. Selective trout. Casts that were usually short to moderate, and had to land soft.

The rods built there reflect it. Catskill rods tend to be delicate, accurate dry-fly tools, with lighter lines and moderate lengths. They load smoothly at short range and put a fly down quietly. Throwing a long line into a gale was never the job.

Jim Payne's shop came out of that eastern tradition, and his work is its best-known example. His 98 and 100 are still the yardstick for 7-foot and 7'6" trout rods. Our rods from this school:

• Beaverhead, Payne 98: 7'0" 4wt, 2-piece, Medium
• Gallatin, Payne 100: 7'6" 4wt, 2-piece, Medium
• Madison, Payne 200L: 8'0" 4wt, 3-piece, Medium

Look at the labels. All Medium. That's the eastern dry-fly rod in one word: a rod that bends deep enough to feel at 25 feet.

The Midwest

The Midwest makers didn't follow one rule. Two of them, working in the same part of the country, went in nearly opposite directions.

Paul Young, in Detroit, popularized the parabolic. His idea was that a rod should flex all the way to the cork on every cast. He wrote about his methods in Making and Using the Fly Rod, and he tested everything on the water before it left the shop. His Para 14 is the taper behind our Henrys Fork (7'9" 5wt, 2-piece, Medium), the rod more of our customers choose than any other.

Lyle Dickerson, in Michigan, built for power. He worked alone, made roughly 3,000 rods, and drew tapers that run faster and carry more line than most eastern rods of his time. They were built for distance, wind and bigger fish, and his 8014 found a following on western rivers. We build three Dickerson tapers:

• Grande Ronde, Dickerson 6611: 6'6" 3wt, 2-piece, Medium Fast
• Deschutes, Dickerson 8014: 8'0" 6wt, 2-piece, Medium Fast
• John Day, Dickerson 8615: 8'6" 7wt, 3-piece, Medium Fast

So the Midwest is really two schools from one region. Young's full-flex rod on one side, Dickerson's power rod on the other. If you want to feel how far taper design can range, cast a Henrys Fork and a Deschutes back to back.

The West

Western water asked for something else. Bigger rivers. Longer casts. Wind, often. Fish holding in heavy current. The western rod answered with more length and more power.

Goodwin Granger, in Denver, set the template. He ran his company for less than a decade, and in that stretch he defined the western trout rod: longer, stronger, built to throw more line into more wind. Our McKenzie (8'6" 5wt, 3-piece, Medium) is built on his 8642.

Bill Phillipson, also in Denver, ran a production shop from the 1940s into the 1970s. His Peerless line was built to cast like a custom rod at a working angler's price. It runs quick and crisp, which is why our Rogue (7'6" 5wt, 2-piece, Medium Fast) is the rod we point graphite casters toward.

California added makers of its own. E.C. Powell built in Marysville and is known for hollow-built rods, where the strips are hollowed on the inside to save weight. That's history only. Every rod we build today is solid. Gary Howells worked at the Winston shop before building under his own name. The Powell "B" and a Howells taper are both coming to the lineup.

Garrison and the engineering approach

Everett Garrison doesn't fit a region. He fits a method.

Garrison was an engineer. Instead of building a rod, fishing it and adjusting by feel, he calculated tapers with stress formulas. He worked out on paper how the load should spread along the rod before he cut any cane. He built fewer than 700 rods. His book, A Master's Guide to Building a Bamboo Fly Rod, completed with Hoagy B. Carmichael, is still a standard reference for builders.

His influence shows up on every Headwaters rod, even the ones that aren't his tapers. We stagger the nodes using Garrison's pattern, so nodes on neighboring strips don't line up. Lesson 2 covered why.

His 209 taper is coming to the lineup.

Why the old tapers keep getting built

A taper is a list of numbers. That's its strength. Anyone with a good rod and a micrometer can measure it at each station and write the numbers down. Builders have done exactly that for generations, and good tapers have moved from shop to shop that way, alongside the ones makers published or shared.

The tapers that last are the ones that kept working. A taper that fishes badly gets measured once and forgotten. A taper that fishes well gets built again and again, by people who never met the maker.

Makers also adapt. A builder might adjust a few stations to suit a modern line, or stretch a taper to a new length. That's normal in the craft, and it's one reason the same famous taper from two different shops can cast a little differently.

When we say a Gallatin is a Payne 100, we mean it's built to Payne's numbers. That's why every rod we build is marked with its taper name. You always know whose design you're casting.

Reading the lineup as a map

Put the schools side by side and the lineup sorts itself. Want a precise dry-fly rod for short to middle range? Look East, at the Paynes. Want a rod that bends right into your hand? Young's parabolic. Need to push bigger flies through wind? Dickerson, or the western rods.

And if you're coming off graphite, the western production shop's answer, Phillipson's Peerless, is the closest thing to familiar.

Next: Knowing whose rod you're holding is one thing. Casting it well is another. Lesson 7 goes past "wait a beat longer" into drills, the stop, roll casts, wind and fighting fish on cane.