If you've been reading my journal, you probably know that I like nice things. Consumerism is not foreign to me at all. Some of you are probably are sickened by my consumerism and are just sticking around for pretty pictures of New York that I take. In any case, I am going to brag a bit about my fishing rods.

Mind you, custom fishing rods that I like so much do not help me catch more fish. In fact, for some reason, the biggest fish that I ever caught were taken on the crappiest rental rods.

What does it mean for a rod to be custom made, you ask? Well, fishing rod industry is somewhat similar to the PC industry. You can either buy a pre-assembled rod, or buy all the same ingredients and put it together yourself. Of course, it takes much more skill and know-how to put together a fishing rod. A rod made by an artisan will be much better than a factory assembled one. The master will find the optimal bend of the blank and affix the guides so that you can cast a bit further, the balance will be a touch better, there will be a bit more sensitivity (all compared to a factory assembled rod made from the same ingredients).

But one thing that the custom rod will have that will instantly set it apart is the butt wrap. Butt is the bottom part of the rod of course. :)

What is a butt wrap? It's a pattern made with tightly woven threads. These patterns are defined by hundreds or thousands of overlapping threads, often wound one at a time. Designs can be simple that take an hour or two or super complex ones that take days of concentrated work.

There is a book about this and even software called VisualWrap for making the designs. No, it's not a part of Visual Studio :)

Some designs, like this dolphin fish , work kind of like pixel graphics.

Others are complex geometric shapes.

The three nice rods that I own are not really custom, although high quality. Buy I've had them custom wrapped, although with rather simple patterns. I'll take pictures sometimes, but right now I can't figure how to minimize glare from the transparent epoxy that covers the pattern.

I am about to buy two real custom rods, and I already picked a pattern for the wrap. The first pattern is going to look like :

Take a look at the rest of this guy's examples here.

And a second one is going to be a simple solid diamond wrap modeled after Samurai Jack's sword.