Wizard of the Water
——————————————————————
Bill Oyster crafts namesake prized bamboo fly rods with passion and precision and teaches others the skill of bringing together form and function.
Story by Alan Clemons
The thing about fishing would split-cane bamboo fly rods isn’t so much the nostalgia, the mystery of something commonly used decades ago, the myriad learning curves, or even how someone can paint mistakenly transform hexagonal slices of incredibly dense grass into a tool that will catch a 5-inch Brook trout or 6-footTarpon. All those things are true. All of them matter to anglers who string up a bamboo fly rod.
Bill Oyster could talk for hours about such matters. He occasionally does, depending on who he’s with, in his Oyster Fly Rods shop in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Oyster often finds himself immersed in the history, details, and minutiae of bamboo fly rods, whether at his workbench or ankle-deep in a Georgia stream. When you go all-N and bet on yourself, as he and his wife, Shannen, have done multiple times in 30 years, you become comfortable with all of it.
Ask Bill, and his mid-50s, what his favorite thing about bamboo fly rods, and he’ll cut to the core. He made his first split bamboo fly rod when he was 27 years old. It was difficult a laborious effort spurred by Bill‘s curiosity and determination. He watched hours upon hours of scrounged-up VHS tapes, read old books, and was spurned, ignored, and treated with indifference by older rod-makers. Bill vowed to teach others the craft if he ever mastered it. And mastering and teaching, he discovered what he loved most about bamboo fly rods.
“My favorite thing is the beauty of it. It’s a handmade wooden thing versus a machine made plastic thing,“ he says. “Modern rods are amazing tools, but they’re just tools. When you hand make something out of a natural material, it has something more to it. It has tradition, romance, and beauty that modern synthetics can’t match while still being incredibly functional. These days, the market for bamboo rods is so small, which means the advertising budget is small, and people assume that modern synthetic rods are the only ones that actually work. Bamboo works tremendously well. It’s all I use. If it didn’t work, I’d be making graphite rods. Bamboo is not as powerful as graphite-it’s not as light, and it’s not as inexpensive. All those things make graphite, rods, wonderful tools. But the bamboo fly rod is a thing of beauty and still is tremendously effective, as we’ve proven time and time again.“
HISTORY IS STILL ALIVE
Bamboo is lightweight yet strong and flexible when dried or fire-cured for use with fly rods or furniture. The best variety for fly rods is known as Tonkin cane, which comes from a 30-square-acre area along the Sui River in southern China, north and west of Hong Kong. Tonkin cane's fibers have more tensile strength than those of other species.
Bill learned all this and more during his trial-and-error days three decades ago after a career path as a professional cyclist was ended by injury, and he needed something to do. He majored in English before his cycling career and considered writing. He already loved fly fishing and was into that. He also loved to read and remembered many older writers who fished with bamboo fly rods. Bill was a man of many creative interests. The romance, the grace, and the old-school vibe of bamboo rods intrigued him. He started searching for books and information, found them and the VHS tapes, and the spark was lit.
The master angler learned about using fire on Tonkin cane to further harden the internal fibers from the old books and VHS tapes, talking with other rod-builders, and his laborious first effort at making a bamboo rod. He learned how to sand the nodes, split the cane, plane the pieces into six equal triangles, and how to put them together. He learned which and how much glue to use and why every sliver must fit precisely. He also learned about resins, drying, guides, spine, handles, wraps — and every other detail for perfecting a bamboo rod. He even learned engraving — the beautiful art that is a signature of his work. It wasn't easy, but the sense of satisfaction was immense.
"Maybe you start fly fishing and eventually you catch a fish on a fly, and maybe you start tying flies and catch fish on flies that you created, which is pretty awesome," Bill says. "It feels extra good, and it's another component or layer to what you're doing, the path you're on. And then you maybe start thinking about going old school, similar to a guy who goes from hunting with a rifle to a bow or a compound bow to a recurve or long bow, right? It just adds one more layer of challenge and romance."
Not everyone embraces or cares about that nostalgia. They're good with today's modern fly rods, which is fine. They may, as Bill says, "scratch the surface and are happy with that." But Bill is a devoted advocate for bamboo fly rods and fly fishing in general. After an Atlanta outdoor writer wrote a newspaper story on Bill's bamboo rods, the phone calls rolled in, and he sold his first rods. Even Former President Jimmy Carter had an Oyster rod.
But Bill isn't going to browbeat you about using a bamboo rod, or harsh your fly vibe, or try to romance you. It either clicks or doesn't, usually, and that's why each year, hundreds of people come to his shop in touristy Blue Ridge to build their own fly rods. "When people ask me, 'You know, why should I fish bamboo?' I'm probably not going to convince you about it," he says. "I've never successfully talked anybody into it. It's the sort of thing that either captures your imagination or doesn't, you know? After reading the first book I found about them, I thought the only thing cooler than buying a rod would be if I built one myself. If you could start from scratch, from something that grew out of the ground, and you turned it into a final product, that'd be the coolest thing ever. And it turns out that it was, to me, and it is to a lot of our clients, as well, especially in these classes."
Students in Bill's classes make their fly rods from start to finish in less than a week. They have come from around the world and every state except South Dakota. A couple of dozen have attended 10 or 20 classes; many give their rods to family or friends as gifts. The time they spend together building rods and strengthening friendships is more important than what they make. Bill's rods have been shipped to "pretty much anywhere anyone speaks English or has the internet." If you want to take a class, the waiting list is complete for 2025, and, possi-bly, perhaps, he might have a "squeeze-in" class here or there.
In the end, a bamboo fly rod is just a stick. It is a gorgeous, madden-ing, satisfying, curious stick, but a tough and dependable stick. Bill says, "You could run over a bamboo rod in the street with your truck, and it'll still fish." He admits they're maybe not the most productive way to go fishing. A bamboo rod requires that you learn to cast and load it correctly for the best outcomes. The learning curve may be sig-nificant, especially if you've ever cast a graphite rod. But to Bill, "You do it for some other reason, you know, because it's just more beautiful, more rewarding."
“Modern rods are amazing tools, but they’re just tools. When you hand-make something out of a natural material, it has something more to it. It has tradition, romance, and beauty that modern synthetics can’t match while still being incredibly functional.”
-Bill Oyster
