Top class carbon fibre rods come with the glitter of technology and marketing dreams of better lives through better rods, yet keen fly fishers still buy, treasure and use cane rods.

Pulling this rod from the bag is like returning to a simpler time – two pieces of carefully crafted grass, a bit of cork, a few wire rings and you have your rod. That’s about as near as I can get to the allure of cane rods.

The craftsmanship Gary Nicholson has applied to this rod is formidable. Most rod manufacturers build rods for us to buy off the shelf. Custom builders discuss our needs and use their experience to choose the best components. Cane builders discuss action, fishing, lines, the person on the blunt end (age, health, height, weight and anything else they can use) and use their skills to fit the rod to the individual from the ground up, a much slower, gentler, more personal way to acquire a rod.

Gary and I spoke about a rod with my casting in mind. He knows I haul and tend to favour medium-fast, moderately stiff rods when I go fishing. So he built this.

It has a great grip and sits snug in my palm – I wish I could get this on off-the-shelf rods. The action is medium-fast, the stiffness is relatively low. This is a 7ft 6in wand, even the most distance obsessed of casters can understand this is not designed for long casting. I expect to use a rod this length at close quarters, I expect it to load (bend) with a few feet of line in the air and I expect it to deliver that line exactly where I want it to go. So, the relatively low stiffness shows the builder knows what this will be used for and the medium fast action suits my casting. In my opinion many short carbon fly-rods are far too stiff, so I need to force them to bend and get no sense of delicacy – but they can cast a long line.

Fitted with a #3 line, the Nicho throws a well controlled loop. Feel, sense of the line, is good. Loads smoothly but a very short range I can feel little of the line and seem to depend on the rod itself. Surprisingly good with a longer line.

As with all the cane rods I’ve tried I am conscious of the mass when I cast this, the tip section of this rod is heavier than a carbon rod several feet longer and considerably more powerful. But, bearing in mind how short and light this really is, that hefty tip section certainly won’t wear out my casting arm in a normal fishing day.

Gary opted to build this with a cane ferrule: the base of the tip section swells and the tip of the butt section narrows forming an overfit joint, similar to joints on many carbon fibre rods. Cane rods more typical have brass or nickel silver joints. Metal joints can be fairly light, this is probably lighter, metal joints can’t bend with the rest of the rod, to some extent this can, metal joints deaden the sense of the rod I feel in my hand – this doesn’t. Cane to cane joints are not new, many years ago I tried a cane salmon rod with spliced joints, that felt like a one piece rod when compared with brass-jointed rods, but they are unusual.

If I had a choice between this and a carbon rod with similar power and action? Really, the only functional objective differences are weight and durability. Where a carbon rod is a fragile delicate little thing I have dragged cane rods through underbrush with no worries. Because this is slightly heavier than an equivalent carbon rod I need to adjust, the rod counter-flexes a little deeper, takes a little longer to straighten. That difference boils down short bits of a second; a competent fly fisher adjusts without thinking. I seem to be able to use the intrinsic weight of this wee cane rod to my advantage, I can be more deliberate but I think that’s because I have more weight to play with, more momentum at my disposal. It's very hard to describe and even harder to be sure I’m not just rationalising.

I’m firmly on the fence about cane rods. The craft and individuality that comes with cane rods is attractive. Better than carbon fibre? I hear you ask. No, not really, just different and in some ways very pleasantly different.