[bigoutdoors]

Military Secrets Help Produce the Ultimate Synthetic Fishing Rod
By William Snyder


Andy stone meets me in front of a small building in Manchester, Vermont, a Green Mountain hamlet known for factory outlets and maple syrup. He's wearing busted Carhartts, a flannel shirt, and a thick backwoods beard. As he guides me to the industrial freezer around back, Stone is so excited that I'm starting to fantasize about what's inside (gallons of Ben & Jerry's?). The door opens, and I see a shelf stacked with what appears to be rolls of black paper towels.

"I know it doesn't look like much," he says, "but that stuff is worth several hundred thousand dollars." The "stuff" is unidirectional carbon fiber — not the ubiquitous carbon mesh found everywhere from dashboards to tennis racquets, but a new superlight variety that was, until recently, a highly classified concoction. I start to copy information from a label when Stone barks, "Don't write down the manufacturer's name," and slams the door shut.

It's not just trade secrets he's protecting — it's national security. The composite is used in Predator drones and spy satellites for the US military. Stone, along with colleagues at the outdoors supplier Orvis, use it to build a fly-fishing rod. Called Helios, its story began nearly three years ago when Stone, Jim Lepage, and another man — so entrenched in top-secret contracts that nobody would even tell me his name (we'll call him Deep Trout) — set out to build the ultimate rod: lighter than anything ever made but strong enough to land the big one.

Through his network of black-ops eggheads, Deep Trout learned about a new type of composite the military was using. Traditional sheets of carbon fiber are woven to create a matrix that's strong in every direction. The advanced brew's tapered pieces of graphite employ a high-temperature epoxy and eliminate the need for a grid, decreasing the number of fibers and cutting weight by up to 25 percent.

It's a long cast from bamboo, which until recently was the preferred material for top-shelf poles. No synthetic could surpass its light touch and ability to maneuver a tiny fly. But bamboo is a total pain in the *** to work with: It can take 80 hours to craft a single rod. And because of all that labor, fine bamboo rigs sell for around $1,500.

As early as the 1940s, rod makers started experimenting with fiberglass, but it couldn't match the mighty grass. In the '70s, they looked to graphite, but it felt dead. Then, as government aerospace contracts started drying up in the mid-'80s, "guys who had been developing military systems started sending us their resumes," Lepage says. They brought with them the secrets of carbon fiber. "We realized that if we could perfect carbon fiber," he says, "it would make bamboo obsolete." But though the new composite could outcast bamboo, it lacked the feel.

They worked for years with composite, never quite matching nature. Finally last year, Orvis rolled a tube from the unidirectional material. It was less than half the weight of bamboo, just as bendy, and substantially stronger: The Helios was born. It's so light — 2.1 ounces for a 9-foot rod — it's even more precise than the panda food. Bamboo was bested — especially considering that a Helios costs only about $750.

Of course, engineers now have another problem: The Iraq war makes it tough to get their secret stuff. "Since we're using the raw materials of Apache helicopter blades, it's not easy to secure an order for fishing rods," Lepage says. If the carbon-fiber supply does dry up, there's a riverbank not far from the shop where bamboo grows like crazy.