Last month, Paul Knauth of Hinsdale and I went to the Catskills for four days.  The purpose of the trip was 3-fold: to meet up with fishing friends that we met last year, to enable Paul to pick up a new bamboo flyrod that he ordered last September which was built specifically for him by excellent bamboo (cane) rod maker Brian Greer of Missouri and, oh yes, to do some flyfishing for trout in the Beaverkill and Willowemoc Rivers in and around Roscoe, NY.

 

Within moments after arriving at the Roscoe Motel in Roscoe, NY we were feasting on a piece of delicious homemade apple/walnut pie.  While good friend Dwight Atkinson was driving up from Virginia, he stopped at a roadside pie shop run by Amish folks and ordered some pies, just like he did last June.

 

Shortly thereafter, Brian Greer presented Paul his new cane rod.  It’s an 8’ 4wt bamboo rod made specifically to Paul’s specifications. Paul ordered it during our September 2023 trip to the Catskills. (See Berkshire Eagle Woods and Waters Column of February 23/24, 2024 entitled You meet the most interesting people while fly fishing in the Catskills.

 

It was made from a bamboo grown only on approximately 48,000 acres up the Sui River in the Guangdong Province in China. The culm was split into strips, measured, planed, and glued to form a hexagonal shaped rod. (Kind of like if you look down at a pie that is cut into 6 even pieces).  The size of the rod at the butt is the approximate width of a pencil and it is tapered down to roughly the size of a toothpick at the tip.  The 6 strips that went into the tip section were comparable to the size of lead in a mechanical pencil.  The cork grip or handle of the rod had a reel seat of maple burl dyed red. The metal piece at the end of the reel seat was made by a friend of Brian’s who specializes in making them. It is a two-piece rod with a third (extra) tip.  Ferrules separate the two tips which had special line guides. Special glues were used and the fit was so precise that you couldn’t even see the glue lines.  There was a special procedure to varnish it too. Additionally, per Paul’s request, there were six discreet red silk rod wraps representing his two sons and 4 grandchildren.

It was truly a work of art.  Brian, in my opinion, is one great rod maker and you can tell that he puts his heart and soul into making his rods. The rod took him around 60 hours to build.  As mentioned in the previous article, close to 400 steps are required to build such a rod. After explaining all of the particulars of the rod and how to maintain it, Brian presented Paul with a piece of the bamboo culm and some bamboo strips.

Then he presented us a bottle of 7-year old Jim Beam bourbon with two glasses etched with our names on them. Along with Paul’s caprese hors d’oeuvres (skewered mozzarella cheese balls, cherry tomatoes, basil and drizzled with balsamic glaze) and pieces of Dwight’s peach melba pie, that bottle was emptied that evening when 8 of us sat around the campfire).

A beautiful bamboo rod is made to fish with, not to just cherish.  And Paul did just that the following day by catching 6 nice trout in a couple of hours.

On subsequent nights, due to chilliness in the air, Brian, Dwight and his fishing buddy Eric congregated in our motel room to talk trout, watch a ball game and munch on my wife Jan’s delicious chocolate chip squares and another one of Dwight’s peach pies.  It was at that time that we discovered that we had a celebrity amongst us. We learned that Dwight owned land in Scotland and that he was a Laird (Lord) there.  His estate lies in the western Highlands, near the Hebrides. (Actually, his daughter bought a one square foot plot of land there and gave the title to him for his birthday). We had fun kidding him as to whether he was going to plant potatoes on that plot next year.

 

Readers may remember Dwight from that February column where I described him as being “retired and seems to fish whenever and wherever he wants, places like the Balkans, Iceland, Scotland and Ireland.” After commissioning Brian to make another bamboo rod for himself (an 8’6”, two-piece 4/5 wt. in his Squire taper), he will be off to Oregon to fish the Owyhee River.  He has already booked a fishing trip to Wales for March, 2025, and then to Ireland and Iceland in May.  Being a laird, I guess he can afford such trips.

 

We also learned that he had the distinct honor of introducing a new word to the Oxford English Dictionary. He didn’t create the word, but he presented it to the OED, the definitive record of the English language. The word is exceedance, which means – an act or instance of exceeding, especially a limit or amount.  Hey! You never know who you’ll meet on these fishing trips, sipping a little bourbon and munching on goodies.

 

We accomplished two of our goals (Paul’s fly rod and meeting friends), and had wonderful culinary experiences, but what about the fishing?

 

We did well.  Both of us caught a dozen or more trout each, some of them quite large. Not bad fishing when you consider that we barely fished before 10:00 am in the mornings, fished until 2:00 p.m. or so, ate early dinners of overstuffed sandwiches (Dagwood Bumstead style) and went back fishing from 6:00 p.m. until dark.  On this trip, we enjoyed leisure breakfasts, chatted with our friends, visited fly fishing shops, and slowed the pace down a bit.  One morning, Paul and I didn’t even get fishing as we watched a MA Fish & Wildlife Board meeting by Zoom.  No, I didn’t see Iron Mike the fabled big brown trout that cleaned my clock a couple of times last year, but I caught a respectable rainbow trout in the area where he once resided.

 

We learned about some new places to fish in the Beaverkill River.  One place yielded one of the largest brown trout I have caught in many years. You should have been there to see that.

 

Picture if you will, this old angler out in the river with a wading staff in one hand (due to neuropathy in both feet and a serious balance problem, especially in moving water) and a flyrod in the other.  A large brown trout hammered my fly so I had to let go of the staff which was tethered to my vest, in order to fight the fish.  After finally getting it close, while keeping pressure on it with the fly rod in one hand I had to grab the tethered net which was attached to the back of my vest with the other. The interesting part was bending down to net that fish while maintaining my balance.  For a while it looked like I was doing the Watusi, with steps and antics that I had never done on the dance floor.

 

Normally, I release the fish in the water without using the net, thanks to the barbless hooks, but this was big and I wanted to show it off to my buddies who were fishing a little ways downstream.  Forget about trying to measure it or taking a photo with the cell phone which was buried somewhere under my chest waders. The trout just barely fit into the net when he spit the fly out.

 

I must have been quite a sight with the fly rod in one hand, showing off a big squiggly trout in the other hand and the attached wading staff and net hanging down in the water by my feet while struggling to maintain my balance.  The fish was released unharmed, but not too happy.

 

The size 12 AuSable Wulff and Usual dry flies, both created by the late Francis Betters up on the Ausable River near Lake Placid, NY, proved to be my most effective flies.   Paul had good luck with size 16 Pheasant Tail Nymphs and Parachute Adams dry flies.

 

What a great time we had.  We already reserved a room in the Roscoe Motel for next June, Good Lord willing and the creek doesn’t rise…..too much.