Fly fishermen come to Blue Ridge, a small town in the North Georgia mountains called the trout capital of the state, from all over the world to angle year-round. They also come to seek out Bill Oyster ...

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 ...

Art Weiler stands in front of his garage at the end of a long gravel driveway that leads to his Kunkletown home. He leans over a 12-foot-long bamboo shaft as he splits it into thinner and thinner ...

A few years ago, a friend mentioned that he had been given a nice bamboo fly rod. It had been sitting in someone’s house for many years, and then in the trunk of a car for half a dozen more. It ...

Larry Donahe, owner of Split Cane Rods in Victoria, makes high-end bamboo fly-fishing rods. Here he wraps parts of the rod in silk thread. A rod can take 50 hours to make and cost $1,500 and up. (The ...

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, ...

The bamboo in the burlap sacks beside the driveway once rose on the sage hills of China's Guangdong Province. A river runs through it. It's the kind of place where ancient artists and intellects once ...

In the rarified world of bamboo fly rod making, names like Ed Payne and Sam Carlson, and their progeny, acolytes and apprentices, stand like giants, casting long shadows that stretch from the dawn of ...