A fishing rod might look like a fairly mundane and utilitarian piece of equipment, but in the hands of Bob DeSouza it becomes a work of art.

DeSouza is one of a handful of custom rod builders in Bermuda, craftsmen who painstakingly add a distinctive personal touch to a plain fibreglass or graphite pole, known in the trade as `blanks'. It is the angling equivalent of having handmade golf clubs.

Turning a rod on his self-made lathe set up in his Smith's Parish kitchen, DeSouza tightly wraps coloured nylon thread around the pole to create a myriad of designs - diamonds, chevrons, boxed crosses, even pictures of fish, although he rarely does the latter. The time involved, he says, would make them too expensive for most customers. The threads on the finished, resin-coated article are almost invisible, giving a painted-on look which, says DeSouza, is the mark of a good custom-built rod.

Largely self-taught, DeSouza has been building rods for more than 15 years. He learned to fish as a boy with his father using a hand line and built his first rod simply because he didn't have one. "I was also lucky to have got instruction from Donald Lewis and the late Gary Rego of Flybridge Tackle,'' he says, "because after Teddy Gibbons, who I believe was the first person in Bermuda to wrap rods, they were the two people you went to to get your rod fixed.'' DeSouza spent several years building rods and repairing reels for Four Winds tackle shop but now works at home in the evenings and on winter weekends.

Summer Sundays, of course, are religiously reserved for fishing.

He builds both new rods and rebuilds treasured old ones, sometimes passed down from father to son. He begins the process by flexing the blank tip on the ground to find its axis. It is along this axis that the circular `guides' which hold the line will be placed. "If you don't build the rod on that axis,'' he explains, "when the rod is bent the guides will twist over.'' Next, the rod is laid in the lathe, and marked off with tape where the guides will be placed. The guides, either regular wire ones or fancy silicon ones with ceramic inserts, are then taped in position with the larger guides towards the butt, or handle, of the rod. "The object is to be able to look down the centre of the guides down to the tip and get a funnelling effect.

With a spinning rod, you're trying to get the line to fly out at a great rate without any restriction.'' Once the guides are in place, DeSouza marks off sections with tape where he will wrap the threads. Then, taking one colour from the thread carriage tightly in hand, the lathe is turned, wrapping the thread around the rod.

"The hardest part is havingthe right tension on the line so it will run up the rod on its own,'' explains DeSouza.

Some designs are simple. A swathe of red with yellow bands at either end, for example. Others are more intricate - a background of black with yellow and red threads criss-crossed in perfect symmetry over it. Unless they want something specific, most customers are happy to leave the design up to DeSouza. He admits: "It's flattering that people have enough confidence in you for you to pick out the colour design but there are only so many colour combinations and after 15 years I'm open to suggestions!'' It can take up to four hours to wrap a rod and then a further four to coat the rod with resin and dry it. The ever resourceful DeSouza has rigged up a coating machine from parts of a chicken rotisserie and a copying machine that is capable of coating sevens rods at a time. "I was using four hours of electricity to coat one rod and figured there had to be a better way of doing it,'' he shrugs.

Although he only builds rods in his spare time - he works with his brother as a contracter during the day - DeSouza says he prefers it that way.

"This,'' he says, nodding towards the lathe, "is my little getaway. It's me, the rod and no one else. This is me. I do it for money but not a whole lot of profit. (his prices start at around $10 per colour, per guide). There was a time when I wouldn't sit behind a rod bench, but it wasn't a happy time.'' DeSouza says there are maybe four other quality rod builders on the Island.

What makes his rods special, he says, is experience. "I've been doing it a lot longer than the others. Don't get me wrong, I've seen other people do fantastic work.'' Steve Antonition, his close fishing pal, he says, "is very good. He's even put a marlin on his rod. It's not worth me doing work like that but if someone wants to try it, I say `Go for it'.'' So will all this fancy rod work actually guarantee that the fish will bite once you're out on Challenger or Argus? Afraid not. "It don't matter what you've got,'' laughs DeSouza, "it's what the fish are eating that day.

Fishing is 50 percent luck -but it still beats golf!'' Above, Bob DeSouza at work on the thread carriage and below, the finished article.

RG MAGAZINE MAY 1993