Early on in my quest for trout and searching for good reading to pass the time in the evenings, I stumbled upon bfly's blog Brianonthefly. It offered great tips and techniques to me, especially on local streams which I had been looking to learn more about at the time. In one of his posts he mentioned commissioning a rod builder to build a custom fly rod for him. It was to be a delicate piece built especially for very small creeks with spooky native brownies that take exceedingly small flies. That builder ended up being Jordan and one visit to his website got me thinking about a custom fly rod of my own.
The next few months were spent pondering a seemingly eternal question. Sparing the details of the journey and for reasons I have yet to fathom, I've decided to progress to the next phase of my fly fishing adventure, ROD BUILDING!
The best feature of custom rod building is obviously everything is DIY (well almost everything anyway). This being my inaugural fly rod build, I knew early on that I wanted to dig in to my roots for design. In case I hadn't discussed it previously, here's a brief synopsis of my background.
I was born on the island of Oahu in 1985 to my parents Dawne and Edwin and am of Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, and Spanish descent. My fiance is six different nationalities, so to say our children will be mutts is understating it! I was raised in Hawaii until I was 13 years old when my family and I moved almost ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE USA to Albany, NY. After high school, I chose RIT to obtain a very expensive piece of paper showing I had some knowledge of engineering, met my soon to be wife, started my career, and settled down into a house only last year. Whew...
The order in which my nationalities were listed seemed to a be a good starting point for the major components of my rod, so off we went. A cursory google search provided me with my first hurdle, a non-existent Philippine fly rod blank market. Honestly, I'm not sure what I was expecting, so perhaps that is what allowed me to leap that hurdle quickly.
I knew I wanted to build something a little different than what the standard fly rod kits offered. I've also been taking to fiberglass rods for a little while too and after searching the webs, decided upon a blank offered by Kabuto Rods in Japan. The builds I got a chance to peruse using his standard, unsanded, translucent white blank were outstanding to say the least. Gray Wolf's build shown to the right is no exception, with the others I saw equally as impressive in build, color, and component combination.
The other elements I chose to reflect my nationalities were:
Hawaiian: Nickel Silver Koa seat/Grandpa's lei feather
Spanish: Red (scarlet) and gold silk thread
Filipino: Grandpa's lei feather
Chinese: "Fly fishing rod" in simplified Chinese
And here were some of the vendors I used for the components:
Vendors:
Kabuto Rods - 7043, white, unsanded
Snake Brand Guides - Universal
JE Arguello Rod Company - Red Agate 9mm
The Hook & Hackle Company - Fishhawk Silk, FlexCoat Lite
RL Reel Seats - Koa Reel Seat
I'll be chronicling the build as it progresses as well as discussing some of the components in future posts, till next time!
