Before going any further, I do want to make it fully clear that receiving a Gehrke bamboo rod different from the one sent to Dave Tatosian will not in any way confirm or refute Dave's account of the quality of the rods sent to him and Dave LaCourse. If asked to give my opinion on the incident, however, I'd say two things: (1) I believe the Dave and Dave accounts of what happened and (2) I'm sure George was deeply hurt by their feedback and took it as a personal attack.

But ordering a Gehrke rod for myself would at least answer one burning question that remained. When given the opportunity to do his very best work, can George make an acceptable bamboo fly rod? Surely he would not accept my offer to take the rod to the Fall Ball and publish photos of it on my Web site and then send me a poorly-made rod, right?

So I ordered the rod, which Gladys Gehrke shipped via UPS on October 4th . On Thursday October 7th, I received the invoice in the mail , so I was pretty sure the rod would arrive that evening. Unfortunately, the UPS delivery person has a tendency to arrive quite late in the day, and when I left for home at 6:00pm the rod had not yet arrived.

When I came into work on Friday, October 8th, I found the following note on my door:

The UPS delivery person had left the package with the Emergency Animal Hospital--a neighboring business in our building--so I would soon have my hands on the fly rod!! Imagine my dismay when I ran down the stairs to suite 107 only to find the following sign:

Since it was Friday, the Animal Clinic would not be open until 6:00pm that evening, leaving my new bamboo rod locked behind a glass door, just out of reach. When I called the clinic's emergency after-hours number to see if someone could help me get my rod, I was informed that retrieving a quarantined fly rod did not qualify as an animal emergency and I'd have to wait. Argghhh!!! 

Click here for Part IV of the story...