New old friends: Split cane rediscovery

A couple of months ago an article appeared on FM entitled ‘Goodbye Old Friend’. It was by Sean Meeghan and concerned the demise of his wonderful old split-cane rod in the attempt of freeing a snagged barbel. Sean was obviously upset so I judged it better to keep schtum about my cane rod experience for a bit. Hopefully enough time has passed and his wounds have at last healed.

You see, I have just discovered cane. Even as a kid when cane was all the rage, I never had a proper cane rod. I had a solid glass five footer as a first rod, then a ten foot Rodril three-piece effort, where the butt and middle sections were whole cane and the tip was solid glass. This assured one of getting a bend in the rod just by the act of assembling it. The 12lb pike I took from Kings Weir on it in 1964 didn’t do it any favours either. From there I progressed to an Apollo Taperflash in tubular steel – which had 14ft of length as its prime benefit. Then it was a 13ft Milbro Blue Match in the new hollow glass… and cane had been bypassed and consigned to yesterdays tackle technology.

Many years passed

So my first genuine split-cane fishing rod only came into my possession a couple of years ago. It was given to me as a thank-you gift from a pal I’d helped out. A two-piece Avon jobby from the 60s said the experts. There was no name on it and it was looking a shade dowdy so I gave it to my friend Glenn Smith to play with. Glenn had developed a passing interest in rebuilding cane rods. I knew from his work at fly-tying that he was a bit of a perfectionist so didn’t think twice about letting him have a go at refurbishing it. And he was cheap, which was even more relevant!

For years I have been hearing from fishing-buddies all over the country about the ‘soul’ of wooden rods, how they were superior in so many respects to carbon blah blah etc etc. I expect you have heard all this as well and perhaps like me just put it down to some sort of retro-elitism that had taken hold. How any piece of heavy old split cane could even begin to compare to my fantastic and super-lightweight carbon fibre rods was, I privately thought, a bit of a joke. Still, I owed it to my cane-loving pals to at least give one a go.

The rod was duly finished and presented to me over a year ago (thanks again Glenn!) but for one reason or another I had little chance to use it much before this season.

At last I got the chance to put the rod through its paces on a trip to the Worcs Avon. My old friend, the very clever Dr Paul Garner takes pity on me once or twice each year and invites me to join him, presumably to show me how it is supposed to be done. And he does. As usual, being the gentleman he is, he let me join him in the hot swim for a social and we fished one rod each. I used the cane rod coupled with an elderly made-in-India Relum pin and fished the upstream position; my wally casting skills wouldn’t stretch to attempting the long downstream cast.

There was only one take that evening and it fell to my Marukyu boilie bait. Talk about mixing the old with the new! The rod top nodded sharply a couple of times; I picked it up and was instantly connected to a wild and angry barbel that did not like being hooked at all! What was special was the rods behaviour during the fight. When I picked it up and connected with the fish there was a brand new experience awaiting me. The fish ran and lunged and turned and came back at me, then did it again and again. Each time the fish made a move, the power curve ran up and down that fifty-year-old piece of wood like a Mexican wave running around a football stadium. Even the cork handle flexed! It was simply astonishing and I fell in love with the experience on the spot. Even Paul, a dyed-in-the-wool scientist who uses nothing but the latest technology was impressed with the action of the rod. We just couldn’t stop laughing, it was just so much fun! The fish was nothing exceptional, in fact we didn’t even weigh it. Paul estimated it as about 7 or 8lb I think, we took some photos and returned it.

The next chance I had to put the rod through its paces was earlier this week whilst fishing with my excellent friends Bob and Casey. I first met Bob Sather in Nepal in 1979. He was sitting on a rock, halfway up a mountain, about a week’s walk from the nearest road, and he was immersed in a book on quantum physics. I don’t even know what those words mean! We trekked through the Trisuli river valley together up to the Tibetan border, then turned around and came back again. It sounds easy, but that sentence contains half a lifetime of experiences; the river was pulsing with mahseer but that’s a story for another day. Bob wound up marrying one of my best friends and Casey is their youngest child. Now thirteen years old and with a few silver-fish trips to commercial fisheries behind him, I thought it was time he put a decent bend in that new fishing rod he’d received for his birthday. So that’s how we wound up at rarely mentioned Cemex day-ticket water one afternoon earlier this week.

It was the first visit for any of us to this water and as both Bob and Casey are very new to angling, I was under pressure as the ‘expert’ to put them on some fish. I explained that in angling, an expert is usually described as “ex” for has-been and “spurt” for a drip under pressure!

We tackled up with both float-rods and quiver tips and dangled our hooks in the water to no avail for an hour then Casey and I went for a walk to explore the unknown. One lap of the lake later, we had spotted some carp and found them to be interested in floating dog biscuits. I quickly set up two Avon style rods with dog biscuit floater rigs, each weighted with a section of candle as a controller. This got Bob and Casey fishing and with a few practice casts they were soon able to cast the distance required to reach those fish we could entice to feed out in the middle.

Which left me with a wooden rod, a rather useless centre pin and, deep in the bottom of the bag, a tiny little Shimano fixed spool I’d bought in Bass Pro in Florida last year for about £6. I’d only bought it because it was so cheap I couldn’t resist it. I wound some 8lb mono onto it, fitted it to the split cane and with this mis-matched set-up I too was soon in the dog-bikkie throwing business.

Watching brand new anglers connect with their first powerful fish is a great experience, especially when it’s sight-fishing. Both Bob and Casey have caught silver fish before but this was their first encounter with creatures which can strip line from the clutch and the first time they have watched the fish take their baits. Between father and son they made most of the mistakes we all made the first time around and learned the lessons the hard way. Striking too soon, or too late, straightening the hooks by applying too much pressure when a fish was hooked etc etc. But they also did lots of stuff right and by the end of the afternoon, when the sun lifted off the water and the fish went down, they both had a few fish to their credit and the smiles said all that needed to be said.

And my mis-matched cane rod and cheapie reel performed wonderfully too, landing carp to double figures and performing that magic Mexican-wave power-curve thing time and time again. I simply cannot get enough of all my old friends, and now I can’t get enough of this new one. I want more. Soon.

Geoff Maynard