AMERICAN SAMURAI

photographs by PAUL KING

story by COLIN KEARNS

The first bamboo rod Oyster ever made took Bill six months to finish.

Once he finally fished with that rod, there was no going back. "I sold all my graphite rods and went on from there," he says.

After all of the splitting, sanding, and blow torching, the filing, fitting and gluing, the binding, varnishing, and engraving, there's still one more task before a bamboo fly rod is truly finished.

"We take the rod outside the shop, down to the grassy strip by the railroad tracks," Bill Oyster says. "And there, we give the rod its first cast. Until that moment, it's all still very unknown. You never know how the rod will perform." Oyster and his wife, Shannen, are the co-owners of Oyster Bamboo Fly Rods, headquartered in a charming two-story workshop in Blue Ridge, Georgia. For 25 years, Oyster fly rods have been coveted by diehard anglers from all over the world-not to mention celebrities, royalty, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. And it's easy to see why: Each rod is a masterpiece, handcrafted the old-fashioned way, right where the bamboo rod was born: in America.

"A lot of people mistakenly attribute the bamboo fly rod to the old-school European scene," Oyster says. "But those guys were all fishing with wooden rods." When some of those anglers immigrated to the U.S., they discovered that their cumbersome sticks weren't suited to Appalachian brook-trout steams, so they started looking for a material to make a lighter, quicker rod. They settled on bamboo.

"The bamboo rod is our samurai sword," Oyster says. "If you want a real samurai sword, you don't go to Detroit. But if you want a bamboo fly rod, you come to the United States. We invented it. We perfected it."

This summer, Bill and Shannen Oyster welcomed us into their workshop so that we could get a glimpse at how the peak of that perfection comes together.

IF YOU WANT ONE OF THE FINEST BAMBOO FLY RODS IN THE WORLD, YOU DON'T NEED TO GO TO EUROPE. INSTEAD, PAY A VISIT TO THIS SMALL SHOP ON MAIN STREET IN THE MOUNTAINS OF GEORGIA 

Oyster splits a cane of bamboo into ¼-inch strips. As for the tool he's using? "It's just a broken-off knife," he says. "We don't want people accidentally stabbing themselves in the eye with an actual knife."

Oyster uses a card scraper to remove the enamel from the outside of the bamboo that blackened during the torching process. "You scrape away all the char to reveal the brown fibers underneath," he says.

"When you make a fly rod— especially in the old-school, traditional way, starting with raw materials and making something that's functional and actually works on the water—it's an amazing, amazing feeling."

-BILL OYSTER

 After the nodes have been filed, Oyster holds the bamboo over an alcohol-burning lamp to heat the bamboo to the point where it becomes flexible. Then he'll secure it in a vise to straighten out any curves.

In this step, Oyster has secured a strip of split bamboo in a vise and uses a farrier's rasp to file down and flatten the node diaphragms that appear every couple of feet on the inside of the bamboo stalk.

Oyster runs a block plane over a strip that's been placed in a planing form-a steel bar with a groove in the middle that has a depth gauge, allowing rod makers to shave bamboo into triangulated strips that will fit together.

"We have to be extraordinarily accurate. We're dealing with thousandths of an inch on these rods. A human hair is about ¾0 inch. Being off just that much will change the rod an entire line weight-from a 4-weight to a 5."

-BILL OYSTER

Six triangulated bamboo strips fit together to form the butt. All Oyster rods have three sections and come with a spare tip. So it takes 24 of these strips to make one rod.

Oyster tightens 13 rings of cork together with a clamp. This compresses them and forces out any excess glue, resulting in a cylinder of cork for the rod grip.

After coating each bamboo strip with glue, Oyster uses fly-line backing to bind them. The tension of the backing is heavy at the rod butt but lessens on its way up the tip.

Riley Gudakunst, the shop manager at Oyster, uses a strip of sandpaper to shape a cork grip as it spins in a lathe. A caliper is used to measure the widest part of the handle. The rest is done by look and feel.

Honoring history, Oyster fastens a guide using red silk. "People use nylon now, but back in the early days, silk was the way to do it," he says. "And we often use red because, traditionally, that was the go-to color."

Gudakunst tends to rod pieces in varnish filled tubes. Each piece has a string tied to it, which is attached to a bike wheel, which is moved by a motor to slowly extract the pieces at about 3 inches per minute, giving them an even, consistent coat of varnish. 

Ryleigh Paxton, an engraver, assists Bill Oyster with the engraving, which is all done by hand, as is demonstrated on this reel seat. "We'll use a felt pen to sketch things into place," Oyster says, "Then we get in there and start cutting line by line."

At Oyster Bamboo, style and aesthetics aren't limited to the fly rods-they extend to the dress code too: Gudakunst refuses to wear a company apron in favor of his broken-in leather one. Who can blame him?

Alone in the workshop, Gudakunst sands a varnished rod. Each piece of every rod is varnished and sanded-again and again and again-until the Oyster crew is satisfied that the pieces have a perfectly smooth finish.

Meet Gudakunst's dog, Pepper.

"She's our shop dog," Oyster says. "She's a sweetheart. We like to say that she lives at the shop, but she sleeps at Riley's house."