Sweetness and light

Since the 1880s the most enjoyable rods to fish with have been made from split cane so why don’t we all use them, wonders Edward Barder.

- Edward Barder

A way from the water, you probably don’t assemble your favourite rod and swish it about. It’s unlikely you’ll have seen it since the last time you fished. It’s a good one and it cost the best part of £900. It was designed by the best in the business, weighs nothing, doesn’t require any maintenance and casts effortlessly. It’s not especially interesting to look at but who cares — it’s the quality of the fishing that really matters, not the tackle, surely.

While most fishing is done with superb, affordable carbon-fibre rods, a stubborn minority appear to think that fishing with split cane places them in a more sensitive, poetic milieu. Are they rather fey eccentrics, these cane lovers, or is there some real substance behind the enduring appeal of these rods?

It’s worth noting that America’s most engaging, thoughtful and popular fly-fishing writer, John Gierach, is a devotee of split cane.

Here, Chris Yates, regarded by many as the finest writer about angling in the modern age, is also a lifelong cane advocate. When angling and its paraphernalia is depicted in art — Robin Armstrong comes to mind— it’s always a cane rod that the angler is using or that lies on the bank next to the catch.

So what is it that some of us find so appealing about fishing with a rod made from a variety of giant grass cultivated on a windy hillside in an obscure region of rural China? Why should we bother to invest in the defining instrument of our sport if its manufacture and materials haven’t altered for more than a century?