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 with 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 painstakingly transform hexagonal slices of incredibly dense grass into a tool that will catch a 5-inch brook trout or 6-foot tarpon. 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, usually 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-in 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, in his mid-50s, what his favorite thing about bamboo fly rods is, and he’ll cut to the core. He made his first...
