Splitcane

Once upon a time all casting rods and fly rods were created from rent and glued strips of bamboo – called splitcane, or built cane, in British English. This development started roughly around 1860. Before that, fishing rods were made from solid wood, cut or sanded to shape, or other solid natural materials, such as whalebone. This included even massive 16’ salmon rods. Such rods were heavy, relatively fragile and unreliable, subject to wear and tear, and usually had actions that left a lot to be desired. During the second half of the 19^th century, individuals in America, and roughly at the same time also in England started to experiment with rod joints, and later complete rods, made from glued shaped strips of bamboo. 

Tonkin cane became available as a rodmaking bamboo at the turn of the 20^th century, and was quickly adopted as a superior material for making built cane rods. Pretty soon all bamboo rods were constructed from Tonkin cane.

Until the ‘50s era of the 20^th century splitcane was the only viable material to make serviceable casting rods, spinning rods, and fly rods; bamboo rods were made in all possible quality classes, from inexpensive blue collar factory rods to works of art and design, handcrafted by master builders, for people who could afford to pay a small fortune for such a rod. However with the advent of glass fibre as a rod building material (helped not in a small part by the US trade embargo that quickly dried up supply of Tonkin bamboo), and later carbon fibre (invented in the UK as a military aviation material), the entire lower and middle range of the bamboo rod market disappeared, almost overnight. A company like Pezon&Michel for instance, once the largest manufacturers of bamboo rods in Europe, and possibly the world, folded in the 1980s. That notwithstanding, split bamboo rods have never completely disappeared: a small worldwide community of hobbyist and professional makers kept making split cane rods, for a tiny, but discerning audience, using a significantly less mechanized and in some ways less sophisticated process, that however allows for much more customization and precision and more emphasis on optimized tapers and other quality parameters. Clearly the current market size and production volume does not warrant investment in the machinery required for large scale production. 

But why is it that those rare few artisans stubbornly keep making bamboo fishing rods, and why is there still a select community of anglers that insist on fishing with them? Well, mainly because bamboo rods handle, cast and fish differently from fibre-reinforced plastic rods, and because with split bamboo, even with relatively simple tools, it is entirely possible to design and develop your own tapers and rod action, rather than being dependent on what large scale suppliers of glass and graphite blanks will offer you. And as far as casting is concerned, solid rods made from split bamboo really do cast differently from, and easier than hollow tubular resin rods, especially with light tackle (small lures, fly lines in the #2 to #7 range, among other reasons because the mass of these solid bamboo rods helps in loading the rod when casting light lures or short lines. Also, the basic material (high density bamboo) is faster and more resilient than classic glass fibre; if it hadn’t been for the American embargo on imports from China in the 1950s, glass rods would never have become as popular as they did – or at the very least not as quickly. It is entirely possible that we would have gone from bamboo directly to carbon fibre…

Bamboo does require a casting style that is more relaxed than with carbon fibre and is more forgiving than glass fibre; as such it is ideally suited for fly rods and threadline rods. Its casting style suits these types of fishing to a T. This covers most every fly fishing style for trout, grayling, or coarse fish, and to a certain extent also pike. as well as threadline fishing for minnows and light and ultralight spinning for predators - with the possible exception of Czech and Polish nymphing, or French au-toc fishing. Fishing styles that require you to cast a mile of line, into a gale-force wind are much better done with plastic rods. But presenting a tiny fly to a rising trout, on a small overgrown stream, and playing that trout, regardless of whether it is a 4 inch or a 40 inch fish. is really much better with a bamboo rod than a rod from baked resin and synthetic fiber.