I was saved from this dead end situation by my then new brother-in-law who knew how to fly troll, and even sort of fly fish, but almost nothing about fly casting. His contribution was to take my to a real stream. That wasn't the contribution. To get there we had to take a car, naturally. One with doors. That closed. I can still remember leaning this club on the side of the car, swinging the door closed, and watching the rod, in slow motion, slide along the body of the car in a perfectly timed intersection with the door meeting body. The sound was a mixture of a door closing, naturally, and an egg shell being cracked. Glick! I was horrified. I yelled. I cried. I was so lucky. Out of money, my next rod was by necessity a blonde one piece 7 1/2 foot blank from a new company named Fenwick. I made the rod myself, one piece without ferrule because that was supposed to be a truer, natural action, and I secretly was afraid to cut the rod in half and actually fit safe ferrules. That was before the "feralite" sleeve over end design. In one quantum leap, with the simple swing of a car door, I graduated to actual fly casting, then fishing. This has remained one of the most important lessons I have learned in all this time. There are few problems in rod action and design that are not easily solved. Period. I used that one piece, 7 1/2 foot rod for many years, until it was sectioned near the handle by a steelhead on the backcast, but you've already heard that one. The point is that I learned to live and sleep and travel with one piece rods. I even carried that rod back and forth to the east coast on airplanes, all one piece of it, loose, in the passenger compartment. I got used to stares and "being different". Eventually that rod, or more accurately it's replacement, an actual fish breakage not counting, was retired intact. Lesson: 7 1/2 feet is not long enough to count on breaking regularly. My rod breaking really shifted into high gear when I started fishing the Deschutes. First, I needed to carry three rods rigged, a 3 or 4 wt with a #18 Adams for the backwater sippers, a #5 with a buoyant Humpy or Tom Thumb for the heavy flowing banks and a #7 with a meat 'n potatoes stonefly nymph for the riffles. Then add the extra rod or two, because I might break one, and the sons', or wife's, or father-in-law rods, and I always had 5 or 6 nine foot rigged rods loose in the boat. Now add jumping in and out to fish, loading and unloading every day, backing in and tying to bushes and limbs, and you would think that I would break rods regularly. I did, literally every trip, for three years. I had a regular assembly line pattern going with Fenwick for tip section blanks for awhile. Fenwicks had, remember, a lifetime, free replacement for the life of the original owner guarantee, obvious proof against the cynical break one-buy another theory.
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