Anniversary

October...normally when nature tells the natural world to start scaling back.
Winter and hard, cold times are coming.

And yet, October celebrates my third year in this rathole.
3 gotam years!

Little has changed and yet so much.

I won't go into the why's and wherefores of how I came to be here, but I'm here.
I won't go into why I decided to once again take a leap and rent shop space, pay through the nose on the morning of the worst economical disaster to hit the US since the great depression.
The simple fact is I'm here and I'm keepin' on.

When I started here in this hole...I had been making bamboo for 11 or 12 years I think. In those 11 years or so I had made somewhere around 150 fly rods and repaired or refurbished god knows how many.

My apparent all time high was a couple of years before I moved to AZ in about 2004.
For two years in a row I made 24 rods a year, two per month.
I came close to stopping. I don't make rods on a mill. I make them by hand. I have machines sure...but they really don't speed up production very much. They simply reduce wear and tear on a man who has come to understand his mortality.

Anyway...happy anniversary to me!

Cheers!