Broken rods are a bummer, but the worst time and place to break a fly rod is on a fishing trip in the middle of nowhere.. Something we know a little bit about.
Of all the ways a rod can break (and trust us, we’ve seen a lot), one of the most common ways we see all the time is a broken tip top. Luckily, it’s also the easiest to fix with very few tools or materials. Here’s how.
You have likely saved more than the value of many a rod with this valuable instruction. Fifty two years ago for my 12th birthday, I felt the great sadness of a screen door catch my rod tip on my new $4.99 Coast to Coast rod and open face bait casting reel. A native american boy, Cleatus Tandeski, took some thirty pound braided line, doubled the ends, sliding the broken fibreglass alongside the other and tightly wrapped and airplaned glued it. It was the best rod with a bit more stiffness than the original, but hooked and landed hundreds of small northern pike for the family suppers for years! And that bond never broke!
Great “tip”! I also carry a few spare tip-tops in various sizes, in addition to the glue and a lighter in a small plastic bag in my vest or fishing bag. Saved many a trip for both me and my friends. In a pinch – if the rod is broken too far down to get a tip-top on – you can also “sister” a broken tip section alongside the main section, using a leader or a piece of tippet material, by overlapping the sections and then tying two “whipping” knots with the tippet (like on the end of a rope) and then “frapping” turns to tighten everything up, like a sailor would jury rig a broken mast. It looks weird, and you now have a rod quite a bit shorter than the original, but it works. And you’re fishing!
Walking through the woods/brush.
Often it is the leader/fly attached at the handle that gets caught up in a branch. Snip the fly, and reel the leader into the reel, and break the rod down in half. Now walk through the woods with the cork forward, and then connect the rod, and restring the flyline after you get there, and retie the fly. Doesn’t take all that long to do so.