Hoping someone may know about this. Google wasn’t much help. A friend gave me an old bamboo rod. It is A two piece rod and hexagonal. There is a sticker that has congress fishing tackle and below that SBM company. Does not appear to be a flyrod, and relatively short by today’s standards, probably about 56 inches. The tip is interesting, it is dome shape with two holes drilled at 180° angles. The handle is wood and about a third of the rod length. It was turned on a lathe and has concentric circles running the length, and is swelled out for the palm. Anyone familiar with this? Age and what it was used for. I believe it came out of the Corpus Christi area. Thanks

I have a fairly foggy memory that the Congress was the highest split bamboo line of the South Bend rod company. I don’t know if South Bend ever went by “SBM”. My friend, who use to tell me about the old split bamboo makers as we took turns rowing and fishing, has been gone for almost fifteen years. So many bamboo rods were broken and shortened in repair. Many were very short by today’s standards. My Dad had an old Cortland that was about this same length. It was not it’s original length.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/08/2021 12:01AM by Kendall Cikanek.

Another friend steered me towards the Supplee-Biddle Hardware company who was a distributor of inexpensive rods and other tackle they bought from various sources. I found a little on them with “Google”. It doesn’t sound like their rods have much value with collectors. My friend thought some of their later ones were sourced from Japan, but I couldn’t verify this on-line.

Thank you for the information. Sadly, it has seen better days, and it’s just an interesting piece to have in the rod rack

From your post what you may have is a flounder fishing rig used from rowboats here in the New York area Bay areas
in the late 1940- early 1950 time frame. Don't know about Texas then, but reasonable to think it was similar there.
The handles were turned as you stated yours were. The reel seats were chrome on brass with the seat being the
female of the ferrule and the foregrip being the male. The odd 180 degree tip was so that when the Bamboo took
a set you could run your line through the upper hole to try to get it to straighten out. They were preglass and very
early glass when True Temper Steel rods were still popular.

I would really like to see a pictures of this rod and tip. Robert just dialed up my curiosity.