ON THE ORIGINS OF ‘THE MIDGE’ BAMBOO FLY ROD

ON THE ORIGINS OF ‘THE MIDGE’ BAMBOO FLY ROD

Wednesday, 09 October 2013 13:40

Well, yes, light tackle – well, all right, but this! – Ça alors, c’est vicieux!’ Charles Ritz, on the Risle in Normandy, on first hefting a Midge rod. Translated?... ‘My word, this is vicious!’


1 lee wulff midge

I had always associated the Midge bamboo rod with Lee Wulff (6’, 1 7/8th oz, 4 wt) as designed by him and made by Farlow’s, and to a lesser extent with Orvis’s Midge, a 7 ½’, 3 5/8th oz, 5 wt.

Click in images to enlarge

2. orvis73415midge1

But I was missing the heart of the matter, in that the first bamboo ‘Midge’ was named in the early 1950’s by Paul Young, a 6’3”, 2 oz, 3 wt.

3. paul young midge 2

As Arnold Gingrich put it, ‘Paul Young was certainly the man who took the rod out of the toy or novelty class and made it the versatile rod it has become.’ (From page 104 of Gingrich’s book The Well-Tempered Angler.)

Gingrich goes on to say that probably nobody made the small (bamboo) rod any earlier than H L Leonard. The lightest was in their Baby Catskill class, a two-piece, 6’ stick weighing a shade less than 2 oz. and advertised back then as the lightest rod ever made.

4 baby catskill

It was a conversation piece, but it wasn’t much more. Compared to the Midge as Paul Young first made it and as Hardy, Orvis, Winston, Farlow’s (and Leonard themselves) and many others later made them, that first Baby Leonard was a limp noodle.

I have cast some exceptional Midge-type rods, among the most memorable being Farlow’s Lee Wulff Midge, Steve Boshoff’s crisp 2/3 –wt,

5 Steve Boshoff nets and rod

one of Nick Taransky’s gems, a 6'6" rod used for years by Peter Hayes for casting demos and engraved as well as a Holland and Holland shotgun,

6 Taransky bamboo rod 0071 1

6 Taransky bamboo rod 0071 2

7. Carlin 9

a sweet Carlin (above) owned by Tom Lewin and my Dugmore 000 –wt wand (the upper of the two Dugmore’s in the picture below).

8. A bevy of Dugmore bamboo rods

 

9. PHY Cover Medium

But the point of this piece is to take our hats off to Paul Young, as his grandson has just done writing a book The Complete Paul H Young (Whitefish Press 2013) scheduled to go to press in August for an October release date. http://www.whitefishpress.com/bookdetail.asp?book=115.

13. Birkhall Shoppe

Tony Kietzman, well known fly guide based in Rhodes, hears all about a Homer Jennings bamboo from owner, Tom Lewin, at Birkhall in the Eastern Cape (Tom Sutcliffe photo 2012)

 

See also Ed Herbst’s seminal article on searching for the ultimate small stream fly rod at

http://www.tomsutcliffe.co.za/fly-fishing/friend-s-articles/item/144-ed-herbst-in-search-of-the-ultimate-small-stream-fly-rod.html

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