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Gary - thanks for the comments. I'm not particularly experienced when it comes to casting classic bamboo rods, so what I have to say is merely my opinion.

The rod is quite tippy, very fine in the last eighteen inches of the tip section. This makes it cast a short line very neatly as long as you control the power. Too much force causes a backlash which widens the loop and throws out the accuracy. The feel of casting it with fifteen feet of fly line out is rather like wafting the steam away from a cup of tea - a movement of the hand and forearm with no sense of effort. However, once you let twenty five feet of line out the power of the middle and lower part of the rod comes into play, and it will double haul with thirty feet of #4 line beyond the tip. I was able to consistently put forty feet out across a steady breeze last weekend - and turn over the three-yard leader, so it generates a fair bit of line speed. I've not tried it with a DT line yet so cannot say how much line it will lift off and aerialise. It also roll casts superbly up to thirty feet. I'd be interested to compare the taper with some of the famous 7' 4-weights.

Jeremy - Richard Walker was more than just a carp record holder. He was certainly the driving force behind the development of modern carp fishing in the immediate post-war years, and developed the first purpose-made carp rod using his rod building skill and engineering knowledge (he studied engineering at Cauis College, Cambridge before the war, but left before completing his degree when the war started to help out with the development of radar at Farnborough). He also devised numerous tapers for fly rods, spinning rods and bait-fishing rods, and published the tapers and general rod-building guidance in Rod Building For Amateurs (1953). The rod I made is based on the lightest fly rod taper, which is why I named it the Richard Walker Number 1.

He also developed many other items of tackle we now take for granted in the UK and Europe; the Arseley bomb streamlined casting weight, the illuminated night-fishing float incorporating a Betalight (light-emitting isotope) in the tip, the electric bite-alarm, the first collapsible landing net capable of dealing with a forty-pound fish that was light enough that it could be used one-handed, and many more. He was also at the forefront of carbon fibre rod development; an old Farnborough contact tipped him off about the new wonder material they'd developed and he took Jim Hardy down to see how this material could be used in a rod. A prototype was produced, with which Walker later claimed to have caught the first ever trout on a carbon rod. The production model eventually surfaced as the Richard Walker Farnborough, in honour of the place where carbon fibre was born.

He had a weekly column in Angling Times which ran uninterrupted from 1953 to 1983 - a feat of longevity that to my knowledge has never been bettered. My apologies if you knew all this already, but it may be of interest to some who don't know who Walker was and why, in England, he's still considered as such an important figure in modern angling.

And that record carp - it was caught on bread!