Lesson 2: Whose rod are you casting?

Bamboo Short Course · Lesson 2 of 3

A bamboo rod has a taper. That's the way it's shaped from butt to tip, thinning by thousandths of an inch along its length. The taper decides how the rod loads and casts. It's the rod's whole character.

The great tapers weren't designed by a factory. They were worked out, one plane stroke at a time, by a handful of American makers whose names most anglers never learn: Jim Payne, Paul Young, Everett Garrison. Men who spent their lives figuring out exactly how a strip of cane should be shaped so it would cast like a dream.

Those tapers still exist, and we build to them. Not a rod "inspired by" Payne, but a rod cut to his actual numbers, the same shape he spent decades getting right.

So when you pick up a Headwaters rod, there's a lineage in your hand. That's the part a factory can't sell you at any price.

Part three is the last piece: what all of this costs, and why ours costs a fraction of what it should.

Want to go deeper on the makers behind these tapers? Read about them here.

David, Headwaters Bamboo