Would you like to fondle my rod?

Fishing rod that is….I know, it is a bad joke, and I’ve never met a woman who thought it was funny, but I’ve got it out of my system now, so you’re safe from here on in. By the time you finish reading this, you may be questioning my sanity, that’s OK, I question it on a regular basis as well. The premise of this entry is that over my years of fishing, I have come to believe that some fishing rods are in some way better at catching fish than other, almost identical rods are. You may call me superstitious, or even nuts, but some rods catch fish no matter what, while others seldom, if ever catch fish. I don’t know where this “power” comes from, but I am sure it exists.

Like most young kids back then, I started out with a cane pole with no real, flipping a worm and bobber out there as far as I could for panfish. My dad used a Shakespeare model 1810 reel on a fly rod, and when we were old enough, my dad bought my brother and I Shakespeare closed faced spinning reels mounted on long fly rods, I don’t remember the exact length, but it was either 8 or 9 feet long. Little did I know at the time how important that would be later in my fishing life. I don’t want this to turn into a how to fish lesson, or a lesson on fishing gear, but it is important to the rest of the story. The advantage to a spinning reel is that you can use lighter line than you can with a bait casting reel, and fly rods are generally longer and have a slower action than rods built for spinning or bait casting. By slower action, more of the rod bends while you are casting or fighting a fish than does a fast action rod, where only the very tip of the rod bends. Back then, I knew nothing about any of this, I was just happy to be able to cast and reel, whether it meant catching more fish or not.

My brother and I caught a lot of fish with those set-ups, still mostly panfish, but also a few bass and pike over the years as well. I almost caught one of the biggest Michigan bass I have ever seen on that rig, one that got away. I was still in my early teens, and we were fishing from the dock at my uncle’s cottage, in the rain. We were too stupid to come in out of the rain, which was also an important lesson in its own right. I hooked a very large bass, probably close to 3 pounds, while fishing between the lily pads that grew off to the side of my uncle’s dock. That was the first fish I had ever hooked that I couldn’t just reel in, it was pulling line off the reel against the drag, which had never happened to me before. Despite my lack of ability, I managed to play the fish out and bring it up close to the dock, but that presented another problem, it was also the first fish I had caught that I couldn’t just lift out of the water with the pole. I don’t know who came up with the idea, but it was decided that I should try to pull the fish up on land, so I went down the dock to shore, and was pulling the fish out of the water that way. It was almost completely out of the water when it threw the hook, flopped back into the lake, and swam off to fight another day. Of course it is always the big ones that get away, they are harder to hook in the first place, and a lot harder to land than the little ones.

After many years of good, and hard, service, that Shakespeare reel started wearing out, and open-faced spinning reels were becoming all the rage, so I went out and bought a Mitchell 300 open-faced reel that came with two spools for line. One spool was supposed to be a small capacity spool for light line, the other was for supposed to be a larger capacity spool for heavy line. I’ll explain the “supposed” part in a minute here. The thing was, the Mitchell wouldn’t work on the old fly rod I had been using up until that time, so I also purchased the longest, slowest spinning rod I could find at the time, one from St. Croix. At the time, you couldn’t find a long, slow spinning rod that would have been equivalent to the fly rod I had been using, no one made them, or so I thought.

I filled the small spool of the Mitchell up with 6 pound test line, mounted it to the St. Croix rod, and caught fish. Not a lot, not any large fish, but the outfit did do OK. And then I met Spud. He was already an accomplished steelhead and salmon fisherman, fishing that I had been wanting to try as well. He looked over my outfit the first time we went fishing together, and told me that while it would work, I would be better off with an even longer and lighter rod than the St. Croix that I had purchased just a couple of years back. That was late fall, and I could tell from what little fishing we managed to get in that Spud knew what he was talking about, and I read enough about that kind of fishing to know I wasn’t alone in trying to find suitable equipment. It was kind of funny, what my dad had always used, a Shakespeare 1810 on a long fly rod was about the best you could do as far as store-bought gear, and you would see a lot of guys lining the rivers using that set-up. The Shakespeare reels my brother and I had grown up with would have worked, but they couldn’t stand up to the wild runs that steelhead are known for, or the power of big salmon, the 1810’s had their problems with big fish too.

Spud used a custom-made rod, built by a friend of his, Doug, actually, he had a couple of rods Doug had built for him. He let me borrow one of his a few times when we went fishing, and I knew that is what I needed as well. That was the growing trend at the time, many fishermen were opting to either build their own rods, or buy a custom-made one, none of the rod manufacturers made a suitable rod for light line fishing for large fish. So I talked to Doug and worked out a deal for a custom-made rod of my own.

Doug is one of those guys you read about in fishing books that you doubt if they truly exist until you meet one like him yourself. Doug was a true fishing bum, he lived to fish. He lived in a hippy/commune type arrangement with several other people, renting what had been a house for the servants at a large resort on Glen Lake. For spending money, he worked as the mate on a charter boat in season, and built custom fishing rods in the off-season. He drove an old beat to crap van that was falling apart, seldom ran, and was rusting away. Where he found the paint, I don’t know, but he had painted the van in an ugly orange color by hand, you couldn’t miss it, it was called the Valveeta van, and for good reason. It was the color of Valveeta cheese. Most of the time it sat in the drive way with the hood up, not running, but on those rare occasions he was able to drive it, every one knew who it was because it stood out like a sore thumb.

The rod Doug built for me was a thing of beauty, starting with a translucent burgundy un-sanded Lami-glass 9 foot long fly rod blank. I am not sure, but I think he must have cast a spell on it when he was building it, I wouldn’t put it past him. I could see Doug lining up a batch of his latest creations right around midnight, with incense and candles burning, chanting made up words just to freak his roomies out. Doug would do something like that if only as a joke, but I do know this, that rod caught thousands of pounds of fish for me, there was something special about it right from the very beginning.

The beginning was April Foold Day, 1974, the first time I got to try out “Bigstick”. Spud and I fished for steelies in Sand Creek that morning, and the “Bigstick” proved it could catch fish that first morning.

Me, with my first steelhead, many years ago

That was the first of countless fish that I caught on the “Bigstick”, which also became known as “Killer” or “Ole Faithful”, how many fish, I have no idea. I used it for everything, from small panfish to salmon and steelhead, and seldom did I fail to catch at least something. Even if I didn’t manage to catch something, I often came away with at least a good story to tell. The Bigstick was a couple of years old by the time of this story, spring steelhead season was over, the middle of May. I had just refilled the spool of the Mitchell reel, only by then, for playing the big fish I was catching, I would fill the large spool made for heavy line with 6 pound test. I had seen Spud get stripped, that is, a large salmon made a very long run that Spud couldn’t keep up with, and the fish took every bit of line he had on his reel, and of course, got away. So instead of filling the small spool made to hold a little over 100 yards of light line, I was using the large spool for light line, and filling it with nearly 600 yards of line, no fish was going to strip me! That should also tell you something about how often I fished back then, it was the middle of May, when most fishermen would just be getting their gear ready for a new year of fishing, and I was replacing the line on my reel already, as it was getting worn out. And yes, line does get worn out, it can only take being stretched so much, along with the cycles of being wet, then drying.

Anyway, it was hot that day, with temperatures getting up in the mid-eighties, way warmer than the average May day. If fact, Spud and I tried to get our girlfriends to go with us, as a picnic rather than fish, but they were both busy that day. We borrowed my dad’s boat, and went trolling off Grand Haven, but we didn’t have very high hopes given the weather, and our late start from trying to talk the girls into going along. We had been reading about people having luck trolling the “scum line” for steelhead, so we thought we would try that. Lake Michigan is large enough that pockets of water with different temperatures form, and where those pockets meet, it forms the “scum line”. We found the scum line in eighty feet of water. We set-up our rods to high line, that is, we didn’t use downriggers or weights, we let out 100 yards or so of line, and let our flatfish work 10 feet or so below the surface. I have to tell you, I have never found a better lure to troll with than a pearl colored flatfish overall. Some lures get hot for a while, or certain times of the season, but you can’t go wrong trying a pearl flatfish. You can cast them, but they always get the hooks tangled up in the line, and they are more trouble than it is worth, even though they do catch fish that way.

We had been trolling for a while when I noticed that the Bigstick was acting funny, and since I was driving the boat, told Spud about it. By then, the rod tip was bent over almost all the way down to the water, and he grabbed the rod out of the holder and hauled back to set the hook. Then he hauled back again, which was strange, he yelled up to me that he thought we had gotten snagged on something, which made no sense, since we were only fish 10 feet or so down in 80 feet of water. I bumped the boat into neutral as we were having that discussion, and Spud was insisting we had gotten hooked on a log or something, when the Bigstick made one huge bounce, and the reel started screaming as the fish finally took off.

I yelled back to Spud, “Yup, it’s a log alright”.

He yelled back, “Look at your watch, this is one big fish!” so I checked the time as he held on as the fish ran, and ran, and ran some more.

Then, he asked me how much line I had put on the reel, as it was starting to get low, and he thought it would be a good idea if I started following it in the boat so that we didn’t lose the fish. So I put the boat in reverse, and started after the fish, that was still running, but at least we weren’t losing as much line as fast. The fish finally slowed down, and we caught up with it for a minute or so, only to have it take off at a 90 degree angle to the direction it had been running before. When the line started getting low on the reel a second time, I again followed it until it finally stopped a second time. By now he had been playing the fish on for 20 minutes from the first time I looked at my watch, and we were nearly a mile from where we had hooked the fish. For the next hour, the fish pulled the boat slowly and steadily almost another mile, and by then, Spud’s arms were giving out, and he told me to take over. I said “You know this won’t count as a record then if the fish turns out to be that big?”, and his reply was, “We’ll lie. My arms ache too much to pull on this thing anymore”. Every once in a while we would be able to feel the fish shaking its head, trying to dislodge the hook, and it was getting tired as well. We would be able to pull the fish up off the bottom a few feet, then it would zip back down and sulk some more, but the times we were able to move it were getting closer together, so we thought we were going to land it, or at least get a look at it.

That was the worst part, we had no idea what we had hooked, it was definitely a fish, but what kind? There are some huge, over a hundred pound sturgeon in Lake Michigan, but they are bottom feeders, not likely to be hitting a flatfish highlined in 80 feet of water. By then, we just wanted a look at it, to see what it was, but that was not to be. I had handed the Bigstick back to Spud, and a few minutes later, he was able to lift the fish up off from the bottom again, but that time, the fish didn’t just zip back to the bottom, it took off on what we thought would be its last run. It was headed full steam towards Milwaukee, and suddenly, the line went limp. The hook had pulled loose, that often happens when you play a fish for a long time, the pulling on the hook opens up a slot in the fish’s jaw, and the hook just falls out. If only we would have gotten a look at that fish.

That was one of the few fish that escaped the Bigstick. From that first day I used it and landed the very first steelhead I ever hooked, it was known for bringing in fish. Spud gave me a hard time that first day, telling me no one hooks and lands a steelie their first time out, but the Bigstick and I did. He would often hook more fish than I did, but when we looked at the number of fish landed, we were pretty close to being even. When we would talk about that, I would chalk it up to “Killer”, what I was calling the Bigstick back then. It got to the point where it was the only rod I used, for everything. From fishing for panfish, to surf casting or fishing from the piers in Lake Michigan, to trolling, to fishing cedar swamps for brook trout. Its length was a bit of a problem fishing in tight spots in those cedar swamps, you were “supposed” to use a short ultra-light rod, around 5 feet long. I made up for that by staying farther from the banks, and spooking fewer fish in the process, or by sticking the Bigstick through small openings in the trees to reach places a short rod couldn’t.

I guess the St. Croix rod I had must have had its feelings hurt, since I never used it any more, it committed suicide. I had made a built-in rod box in my truck, and one night on my way home from the Traverse City area, the tip section of the St. Croix rod managed to escape the rod holders in the box, open the box, then open the tailgate of the truck, and jump out somewhere along M 37.

When I took up fly fishing, I started with a rod I borrowed from my dad, but it wasn’t quite right for the kinds of fishing a was into. It was too light for salmon and steelhead, and too heavy for trout. I figured that if Doug and others could build rods, I could too, so I built two, one was a 7 foot 6 inch rod made for a 5 weight fly line for trout, the other was a 9 footer for a 9 weight line, almost identical to the Bigstick. Both of them worked well, and even though the 9 footer was almost an exact duplicate of the Bigstick, I never had as much success with it as I had with the Bigstick.

That’s when I started to think there was something extra special, almost supernatural about the Bigstick. Spud used rods Doug built for him, yet the Bigstick managed to out fish Doug’s other creations. The rod I made was almost identical to the Bigstick, but the Bigstick out fished it, and by a wide margin.

One thing I do every year in January is to go through all my outdoor gear, clean and inspect it, and do any maintenance needed. It was around 1980 that I was doing this, and I was checking out the Bigstick to see if the varnish needed to be touched up any place, and I saw that there were small stress cracks starting to form in the fiberglass from the hundreds of fish it had fought. And, the line guides had deep grooves worn into them from miles of fishing line being pulled in and out over them. I decided that it was time to retire the Bigstick, I sure didn’t want it to break, that would have been very sad to me, like losing a friend.

Two things had happened in the tackle industry since I had asked Doug to build the Bigstick, one was that graphite rods had been perfected, and the other was that the rod makers had seen that there was a market for long rods made to use light line, so I was able to buy a replacement for the Bigstick right off the shelf. In fact, I bought two, the exact same rods, but I marked them once I had them home so I could tell them apart. Both of those rods have served me well over the years, both catch fish, but the one does have a slight edge in the number of fish caught compared to its twin.

Even after I made the switch from trout to bass fishing, I would still always bring the Bigstick along with me. The only times I used it were on the really tough days, when after hours of no fish, I would get it out of the rod box, ask it to do its stuff one more time, and start catching fish, at least a few so I never went home after being shut out. It was those times I would use it and catch fish when none of my other rods could that earned the Bigstick the alternate name of Ole Faithful. You may think that I am making this up, I’m not, the Bigstick catches fish when all other rods have failed me. You may think I am trying to send some more business Doug’s way, but I haven’t seen or heard from Doug in decades, besides, I learned the Bigstick isn’t the only rod with that power.

When I made the switch back to fly fishing for trout, I went back to using the rod that I had built myself many years before, but it was an old fiberglass rod, and the graphite rods I had used since I built it had spoiled me. During the time Larri and I were together, she wanted to take up fly fishing, something she always wanted to try. So I was putting together an order to Orvis to purchase the things she needed. As we were discussing the order, I was telling her how much I had always wanted one of the Orvis “Superfine” rods, the “Far and Fine” model. It is an 8 foot 6 inch long rod for a 5 weight fly line, I had been drooling over them since I first tried one behind Dick Pobst’s Orvis shop in Ada 30 years before. She said “You’ve told me that the Orvis tackle you bought then is worth more today than you paid for it, and you have the money, so quit being a tightwad and buy one!”. That was one time she was right. I love that rod, and it catches fish! I was worried for a couple of outings, but then, we weren’t really fishing as much as I was teaching her how to cast. The first time we went trout fishing on the Rogue, I was catching fish with the new rod.

Just like the Bigstick, it catches fish when others fail. A couple of years ago, I pulled up to one of my favorite spots on the Rogue to fish, but there was some one there already. He was just getting ready to fish, and not wanting to crowd him, I fooled around checking out some other spots to fish to give him a chance to work his way downstream a ways before I started fishing the same water as he was going to fish. The conditions weren’t the best, we had a heavy rain a few days before, and the river was still high and a little muddy. I hadn’t found any good places to fish upstream, and I had given the other fisherman plenty of time, so I went to where I had intended to start, and began fishing. I had only made a couple casts before landing a small brown, and about that time, the other fisherman was coming back towards me already. He was complaining about the water, and told me he had fished the best water with out even a hit, so he was going to go down below the Rockford dam and fish there. I didn’t tell him I had just landed a fish from the water he couldn’t get a hit in, why rub it in, and I hadn’t even gotten to the good water yet.

When I did get to the good water, I caught even more fish. I won’t say I had a spectacular day, just a good one, landing a half a dozen or so nice rainbows, and a couple of small browns as well, from water the other guy couldn’t get a hit in. That got me to thinking again, maybe the new rod had something special just like the Bigstick, so I thought I would test that idea. Usually when Larri and I went fishing together, I caught way more fish than she did, we had always chalked that up to her being a rookie, but I wondered, could it be the rod? So on our next outing together, I told her to use my rod, and that I would use hers, under the guise of helping her with her casting. It did do that, she was able to cast mine better than her own, but not only that, for the first time ever, she caught more fish than I did.

It was the next spring, when she and I attended the Trout Unlimited banquet together, and one of the rods being raffled off was a smaller version of the one I had just bought a couple of years before. I was going down the line of rods that they were going to raffle off that night trying them out to see if I would make a try for any of them, and one of them just came alive in my hand. It was if the rod and my arm became one, along with a jolt of electricity. I called Larri over and told her she had to try it, and as she picked it up, she said “ooo, this is light”, and after giving it a twitch or two, she added, “and it’s like it’s alive!”.

I looked down at the card with it and saw that it was an Orvis “Superfine” 7 foot 6 inch rod for a 3 weight line, one of their “Trout Bum” models. I wanted that rod bad, I could feel it when I picked it up. I put all my raffle tickets in on that one rod, but lost out to a woman Larri and I had been talking to earlier. I offered to buy it from her, but she wouldn’t sell. I wanted one so bad, I ordered one up that very week. The one I got is a great rod, but it doesn’t have the same feel as the one at the banquet, and doesn’t catch fish as well as its bigger brother. It casts well, fishes well, even attracts a lot of hits, but I miss a lot more of the hits with the 3 weight rod than I do with its big brother, that may be me.

The next year at the TU banquet, we ran into that same woman again, and I asked her if she would be willing to sell the rod then, and her reply was “Are you kidding me? That rod has improved my fishing so much that I outfish my hubby most of the time now. I love that rod!”, no kidding, I love it too.

That year I did win an R. L. Winston 9 foot rod for a 5 weight line, by all accounts, one of the best fly rods ever made. Before I used it, I had a hard time imagining that any rod would be superior to the two Orvis rods I have, but I was wrong. The Winston rod casts effortlessly, and the accuracy of my casts are unbelievable with the Winston. It will punch out casts into a strong wind easier than I can cast either of the Orvis rods in a dead calm, but it doesn’t catch fish as well as either of them do, especially not the Far and Fine. That I don’t quite understand, with the Winston, I can place the fly exactly where I want it, not just with in a couple of inches like the Orvis. Mending line, which I won’t explain here, but is a big part of fly fishing, probably as or more important than the cast, is a dream with the Winston, much easier and more precise than with either on my Orvis rods.

Building a fishing rod is actually quite an intricate process, from building the blank to attaching the hardware to get the balance and action just right. You could argue that some rods seem to work better simply because some rods are built closer to being perfect than others. The blank came out perfect, the reel seat, handle, and line guides were set perfectly to turn out one in a thousand, where the rest of them were put together with some part of the process off just a little, but enough to make a difference. But, that doesn’t explain it all. I have never used any rod that fished as well as the Winston rod I won from Trout Unlimited, but it doesn’t catch as many fish as the first Orvis rod.

There is something to be said for having confidence about the outcome when you are fishing. Maybe you fish a little better, or are more focused when you use a rod you have faith in, I don’t know about that explaining the differences between rods though. I don’t know what the answer is, I just know that if I were to be thrown into a survival situation and could take just one fishing rod with me to help me survive, it would be the Orvis Far and Fine. I know that I wouldn’t starve if I had that rod with me. I would say the Bigstick, but as old as it is, with all the stress cracks it has developed over the years, I am just afraid it would hook some monstor fish and end up breaking on me. In fact, I am sure it would hook some monster fish, it always does, but it deserves to be retired after all the fish it has landed over the years. I just hope that it passes its power on to my other rods.

January 26, 2011 | Categories: Fly Fishing, General | Tags: Fly fishing, Nature | 1 Comment