By Trey Combs
When I visited Kerry Burkheimer’s fly rod plant in Washougal, Washington, I discovered a remarkable marriage of timeless Old World devotion to absolute perfection in craftsmanship, to cutting edge performance in graphite technology. During a time when fly fishing dealerships are quitting, when fly shops are going out of business, when sales in the fly fishing industry are static at best, Burkheimer rods remain so in demand they’re constantly backordered. King or commoner, with money up front, must wait for up to a month to get their Burkheimer rod.
Kerry’s guiding principle, “one at a time, one of a kind,” describes his custom approach to rod making. Once a blank has been completed, the many cosmetic options come into play. The standard model, the dark green “Classic,” can be upgraded: reel seats, exotic wood inserts, colored guides, agate or titanium for stripping guides, even the rod itself can be given a custom color. He has standardized groups of upgrades for Presentation models, and for Vintage models. The fly fisher who receives his “Burkie” can go to the riverside knowing he’ll likely never see another angler fishing the same rod.
Kerry, quiet and unassuming, says simply,” We build the finest custom fly rods in the world.” Walk through the plant and Kerry would be hard to pick out. He and every employee works diligently at specific tasks. No job is so much as touched outside the plant; no fly rod component comes from overseas.
Kerry guides me from one workstation to the next. On a bench and positioned upright for final inspection, are a half-dozen trout rods, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. They are bound for a fly shop in Seoul, Korea. I smiled at this reversal in fly rod commerce; little else could so underscore the quality of Burkheimer rods. Standing in a corner is a knobby fly rod case made from South African Cape buffalo hide. Inside are two-hand rods. They’re on their way to England for Eric Clapton, an avid Atlantic salmon angler. Kerry doesn’t tout any of this. It’s business as usual.
The monthly factory output is but 100 rods. Kerry says, “We’re expanding, and by using additional rooms in the building, we can reach 200 rods per month. But that’s it. I never want to grow more than that.” Compare those numbers to other manufacturers who knock out 5,000 rods per month. That’s like comparing GM to Ferrari.
I asked Kerry about all the odd lengths; he doesn’t seem to build in conventional 6” increments.
“Do customers order a certain length, and you design and manufacture accordingly?”
“You kind of have it backwards,” he said. For example, we set out of build a 12-foot rod, and then take the resulting blank, and fine tune it. We may feel it needs an extra inch or so, or needs to be cut down a bit, to perform to our standards.
Kerry’s rod design apprenticeship lasted many years, first with Loomis Composites, and then with Russ Peak, a legendary pioneer in rod design. Kerry would eventually buy Peak’s business and soon establish his own brand.
I recall years ago when I was giving talks at an outdoor show and Russ Miller ran me down. I had featured him in “Steelhead Fly Fishing” and I knew him to be a passionate steelhead fly fisher. He told me of an 8-weight rod of about 13 feet he had recently purchased. At the time, this was an odd size. He’d been fishing it on the Skagit for winter steelhead and I thought the rod short and light for this kind of work. Russ never runs out of things to say about steelhead. But on this day, one superlative after another described this new rod until he had exhausted the subject. The rod was a Burkheimer. Like most steelhead fly fishers, I’d never heard of the brand. That would change very soon.
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