Materials + Processes

Makers

Fishing for Perfection

The makers at Oyster Bamboo construct custom-made fly rods that are as beautiful as they are expertly engineered.

By Joe Hart
May 14, 2025

Summer 2025

Craft Companies

Free To Read

Photo by Corey Woosley

Oyster wraps flyrod "guides" to direct the line during casting.

In 30 BC, the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote that good design should embody strength, utility, and beauty. At around the same time, ancient Macedonian fishermen began hoodwinking fish with cunning insect puppets (known by the modern sportsperson as a “fly”). And while it’s doubtful Vitruvius ever picked up a fly-fishing rod, it’s hard to imagine a manmade object that better exemplifies his dictum.

Unlike your average Huck Finn operation (a hook, a worm, a stick), a fly rod is a highly complicated piece of engineering. Since the ultimate goal of each cast is to mimic the gentle landing of a bug on the surface of the water, which fishers do by making mellow, whiplike motions to create a wave, a functional rod will faithfully replicate this impulse and transfer it to the gossamer line connected to a featherweight fly. If all goes well and a fish strikes the fly, the rod must also be strong enough to reel in the catch.

Building the perfect rod, strong yet supple, has been an enduring obsession for anglers. The earliest known fishing guide, Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, written by the Benedictine nun Dame Juliana Berners in 1496, includes detailed instructions for building one from hollowed tree branches.

Three hundred years later, a handful of American craftsmen improved on this design, replacing wood with glued strips of bamboo cane. For the next 150 years, the split-cane bamboo fly-fishing rod was the standard tool for anglers around the world, before man-made graphite and fiberglass came along in the wake of World War II.

Photo by Corey Woosley

Bill Oyster, co-owner of Oyster Bamboo, casts a fly into a favorite stream in northern Georgia.

Back to Bamboo

Today, a handful of artisans still work with bamboo, keeping the craft alive one rod at a time. Notable among them is Bill Oyster, who with his wife and business partner, Shannen, has built a thriving trade in custom-made rods.

Oyster’s work is prized for its quality, and his rods—priced starting north of $5,000—are adorned with intricate silver and nickel engravings, which can take upwards of 100 hours to design and carve. (The late President Jimmy Carter was known to cast for trout with an Oyster fly rod.)

“Modern-day materials like graphite can be made so quickly and efficiently, bamboo can’t compete,” Oyster says. “If you only had $500 to spend, you could get the worst bamboo rod ever made from overseas somewhere, or you could get a really amazing modern rod. The only room left for bamboo is the high end. And our particular niche is the highest end of that high end.”

Designing a rod involves dozens of intricate steps. The process begins with a specialized bamboo known as Tonkin cane. This species produces unusually long, tough fibers to help withstand the punishing winds that characterize the roughly 30-square-mile region of China where it grows. “At full maturity, it’s 40 or 50 feet tall,” Oyster explains. “We use the lowest 12 feet.”

Each bamboo “culm” is hand-chosen by an importer who supplies virtually all rod builders in the world. From this selection, Oyster picks out the best of the best, looking for “cosmetically perfect” culms with no water stains or bug residue. “Other rod makers call those beauty marks, but we call them flaws,” he says.

Those that make the cut are flamed with a blowtorch to even out color and improve strength, and then split into as many quarter-inch-thick strips as possible. Next, those strips are heated to remove the bent tissue where the bamboo grew its node sections.

And that’s when the real work begins. Each bamboo strip is hand planed to make its long edges form an equilateral triangle, so that when the strips are glued together lengthwise they form a hexagon. Each of these composite strips is further shaped to form the rod’s “taper,” following a somewhat mystical formula that results in size reduction from the heavier butt to the lightweight tip. To achieve these minute adjustments, Oyster explains, rod makers use a metal form.

Bill Oyster uses a blowtorch on a culm of bamboo.

Photo by Samuel Hodges

Oyster chooses a “culm” of Tonkin bamboo and uses a blowtorch to even out color and improve strength.

Photo by Corey Woosley

Bill Oyster splits a bamboo culm.
Photo courtesy of Oyster Bamboo

Oyster spilts the bamboo culm into quarter-inch strips, removes all surface imperfections, and hand-planes them to form a fly-rod's taper.
Photo courtesy of Oyster Bamboo

Oyster hand-planes strips cut from a bamboo culm.

“It’s basically a big steel jig, which we can set very, very accurately. That allows us to hand plane within plus or minus one or two thousandths of an inch tolerance. That’s ridiculously small for basically a woodworking project, considering that a human hair is about three thousandths of an inch across.”

A hair’s breadth is all it takes, however, to radically alter the mathematical ratio of the taper, and thus to shift the physical dynamics of a bamboo rod. “If you’re fishing for a little bitty trout in a tiny stream that’s three feet wide, you’re going to have a little bitty, very flexible, short rod,” Oyster explains. “But if you’re fishing in the ocean for a 50-pound fish, you’re going to have a longer, much, much stiffer, heavier rod. How it bends and how much it bends, all of that is accomplished by the size of those triangles along its length, and how those sizes relate to one another.”

The taper can be further customized to fit the casting habits of an individual angler, says Scott Grady, a rod maker based in Appleton,Wisconsin, who serves as the chair of the Northern Rodmaker’s Gathering, one of a half dozen annual skill-sharing events around the country. “I’ll have the customer bring their favorite rod and watch them cast for a while. You can see how fast they move their arm back and forth, and the way they move their wrists. There’s a lot of little motions I can pick up on,” Grady says. “I can make the rod bend exactly where I want it to and make adjustments just for that person.”

Every handmade rod ever made has its unique properties, he adds. “That’s down to the taper.”

When the taper is planed to perfection, several steps remain before the rod is complete: The strips must be glued together and finished with varnish. Every rod needs a cork handle, a seat for the fishing reel, guides for the fishing line, and ferrules to hold sections of the rod together. In the hands of a craftsman like Grady or Oyster, each of these steps is an opportunity to add beauty and value.

A pair of Oyster Bamboo fly rods with ornate hand-engraved seats.

Photo by Jerry Mucklow

A pair of rods from Oyster Bambooʼs Epic series.

Photos courtesy of Oyster Bamboo

An in-house engraver at Oyster Bamboo works on a seat for a fly rod reel.
All engravings at the company—like this medallion—are done in-house.

“[The old-timers] were planning on taking what little bit was left of the industry to the grave. The last thing they were interested in was new competition.”

— Bill Oyster

Casting It Forward

In the pre-internet 1990s, Oyster learned from books how to make rods. He found a handful of old-timers who knew the craft, but they didn’t take kindly to a youngster stepping on their turf. “They were planning on taking what little bit was left of the industry to the grave,” he recalls. “The last thing they were interested in was new competition.”

By contrast, Oyster is generous with his knowledge. Each year, he teaches 24 groups of 10 students, and his waiting list is nearly two years long. At the end of each six-day session, students leave with a completed rod. Achieving that level of efficiency has forced Oyster to consider his own procedures. “Why am I doing all these complicated things?” he finds himself wondering. “Are they making any difference? What’s the important part of this step? What should I really be focusing on?”

Many of Oyster’s students have limited experience building anything at all. Some of them find the experience so rewarding, they immediately get on the waiting list for another go. One student just clocked his 30th time through the course—and he’s already signed up for his 31st.

Kade Worthen took the workshop for the first time this year with his father, as a college graduation present. Halfway through the course, he went online to order a display case to show off his work back at home.

“Yeah, it’s a fishing rod,” he explains. “It’s a perfect, functioning rod. But it’s also a piece of artwork. It’s a centerpiece on display in my apartment, because it’s just so beautiful.”

Joe Hart is a freelance writer based in southwestern Wisconsin. He’s also served as an editor for Utne Reader and Public Art Review.

Photo courtesy of Oyster Bamboo

Oyster Bamboo's storefront in Blue Ridge, Georgia.

Visit Oyster Bamboo online.

Website Instagram

A group of students in an Oyster Bamboo fly rod making class.

Photo by Jerry Mucklow

A group gathers for fly rod making class, which has a two-year waiting list.

Before you go!

We believe that making creates a meaningful world, and we hope you do, too. Deeply researched and impactful journalism on the craft community is in short supply. At the same time, being featured in a national publication can have a major effect on a maker’s or artist’s livelihood, particularly those who are just starting in their career. You can help support our mission and the work of makers around the country by becoming a member or by making a gift today.

Thank you!
American Craft Editors

Join Donate