The Masters of Headwaters Bamboo

Where your rod comes from

Five rodmakers drew the tapers we build. These are the nine rods that carry their work.

A bamboo rod casts the way it does because of its taper, and every taper in our lineup was drawn by a real person solving a real problem on real water. Pick a Headwaters rod and you're picking that person's answer. Here is who they were, and which of our rods carries their work.

Most of these men are gone. Their rods are not. An original signed Payne or Dickerson still turns up in fly shops and at auction, and it still fishes, eighty and ninety years on. That is the whole case for bamboo in one sentence.

What you can't do is buy one for the price of a good graphite rod. So we build the tapers instead. Same measurements, same intent, new cane, and a rod you can fish this season rather than wait a year for.

The name on the taper is the reason the rod casts the way it does.

Jim Payne (1893 to 1970)

Highland Mills, New York

Jim took over his father's shop in 1922 and ran the E.F. Payne Rod Company until he died. He numbered and signed every rod, and he built fewer than 15,000 of them across almost fifty years of work. He is the maker other makers measure themselves against.

Jim built for anglers throwing dry flies to rising trout on the Beaverkill and the rest of the Catskill water. His tapers are crisp and precise, and they recover fast enough to put a size 18 exactly where you were looking. Nearly a century later his 98 and 100 are still the yardstick for 7-foot and 7'6" trout rods. A signed Payne today brings $8,000 to $15,000.

If you fish tight water, or anywhere accuracy beats distance, start here.

Lyle Dickerson (1892 to 1981)

Detroit and Bellaire, Michigan

There was never a Dickerson factory. Lyle worked alone, one rod at a time, and made roughly 3,000 rods in his career. He built for power. His tapers run faster and carry more line than most eastern work of the same era, which is why they found their following on the big western rivers.

That extra backbone is the point. A Dickerson taper handles wind and turns over a heavy fly without you forcing it. A working 8014 sells for $4,000 to $6,000 today, partly because so few were built and partly because they still fish as well as anything made since.

If your water is open, windy, or holds fish bigger than the ones in the magazines, Lyle drew the rod for it.

Goodwin Granger (1881 to 1931)

Denver, Colorado

Goodwin ran his company for less than a decade before he died, and in that short stretch he set the template for the western trout rod. Longer, stronger, built to throw more line into more wind. The 8642 we still build is that idea in a single rod.

He built for people who actually fished, too. Granger rods were priced for working anglers, and eighty years later plenty of them are still on the water, because he built them to be fished.

Paul Young (1890 to 1960)

Detroit, Michigan

If you have ever heard the phrase "parabolic taper," you have Paul Young to thank for it. He believed a rod should flex all the way down to the cork on every cast, and he built a whole line of rods around that one idea. His book, Making and Using the Fly Rod, is still in print.

He was a fisherman first. He tested his tapers on real water and kept the ones that fished, which is why the Para 14, Para 15 and Para 17 are still being copied seventy years later.

A Para 14 loads deep and slow, and you feel the whole rod work on every cast. That feel is why our Henrys Fork is the rod more Headwaters customers buy than any other.

Bill Phillipson (1902 to 1989)

Denver, Colorado

Denver again, and a very different kind of shop. Bill turned out thousands of rods from the 1940s into the 1970s, and he's a large part of the reason working anglers in the American west could own real bamboo at all. His Peerless line was built to cast like a custom rod at a fraction of a custom price.

He drew the Peerless to run fast, with a crisp, quick action and a tip that recovers in a hurry. Of everything in our lineup, it's the taper that feels most familiar in a graphite caster's hand, which makes it the easiest bridge into cane.

Bill also proved the thing Headwaters is built on. Good bamboo doesn't have to be precious to be good.

The lineup at a glance

Coming to the lineup

We add a maker when the taper earns its place. These are the ones in the shop now.

Not ready to pick a rod yet? The Bamboo Short Course is three short emails on why anyone still fishes cane, whose rod you are actually casting, and what a bamboo rod costs and why. No pitch, no cost.

Common questions