Shuksan Rod Co.

*Shuksan Rods is no longer taking new orders.

2/2, two piece/two tip rods…..$3,000.00

Length, line weight and taper of your choosing. Custom rods to order. This is not a production shop, only a limited number of rods are made each month.  Price includes traditional brass & aluminum tube and flannel sack. Wait time approximately 6-9 months. Occasionally, rods in stock.

The best way to initiate a sale is to reach out, feel free to call even if you just have questions.

email: jw@shuksanrods.com

phone: 206.799.5321

I earn a living and a life hanging on to a busy Seattle fire truck and from splitting and wrapping bamboo into fly rods.  It is a stretch to identify my working-self as anything more than a tradesman, certainly not an artist.  A blue collar life, I have to shower after work, not before.  At the same time, there is an impulse toward art; the attempt to mend ideals, aesthetics and craft into something of truth and use; and to make it beautiful and good.

If a Shuksan splitcane flyrod is anything, it is just and only that.  The rod is tool of utility and purpose.

Each rod is custom made.  And they are made to be more than just a fly rod.

It starts from a single culm of Tonkin bamboo.   The culm is tempered by flame -I don’t make blond rods- which allows me to bring out deep coffee tones.  Next the culm is hand split and hand planed into tapered strips, glued together, and the guides wrapped with silk. The stripping guide is always an agate. No machinery is used in the process. No two rods are the same.  The process takes approximately eighty hours, plus extensive cure times for the glues and the varnish.  Finished rods are dipped in the highest grade marine spar. It takes months for the varnish to fully cure.

NOTE: No longer taking new orders. Of water, a cascade of wonder, or maybe an ascent, my family and I have dedicated our time moving forward to the Catholic Church. I rarely check the accounts associated with Shuksan Rods anymore. Please know if you contact me I will get your message, though it may be a couple weeks before I see it. Still I’d love to hear from you and I will reply. Meanwhile, tho hammering out a few more years as a Seattle fireman and wrapping the last rods, I’ve dedicated my life to answering God’s call, a desire only for Him and things of Him. For all who supported Shuksan Rods all these years my endless gratitude to each of you, this chapter was incredible and I never envisioned the success it enjoyed, and for those who found inspiration here…continue to carry the Light -what you do with this one life matters. And last cast, my parting words are simply this: lean only and always toward Life, its Truth and its Way.

Since 2007 I’ve been making Shuksan splitcane fly rods out of our home in Bellingham (WA) looking from a window over little Lost Creek. It’s a house not made with hands, and it’s where the heart is. I know who my day belongs to, and I’m up before 5 most mornings to greet him. Coffee is always on.

(photograph Elias Carlson, Ladder Co. 3 Seattle WA)

I love to read, write a fair amount, and still listen to music on a record player. These rods are a culmination of experience and an expression of my relationship to fire and water. For nearly 25 years I’ve been a fireman in Seattle’s busy Central District, where if you’re listening you can still hear Jimi. We do our job the same way it’s always been done, minus the horses. And in what seems like a lifetime ago, I was a surf lifeguard on the beach in Santa Cruz and a rescue diver.

I’ve always thought being kind goes a long way, and that being tough is a function of endurance, and both are a requisite to happiness. Still, it all requires nerve. Having competed in the Ironman triathlon for nearly thirty years, I’ve learned this: there isn’t a finish line, and joy is available in the suffering.

However difficult, tell the truth. Your life depends on it.

And generally, I’ve found it’s always better to be last in line. -jw