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Drumheller’s great-grandparents inspired a love of fishing, crabbing and the outdoors.
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Handle size, length and wood choice. Pecan, red cedar, persimmon or another variety.These are choices left to the customer.
You could say Neil Drumheller came by his passion and skill for building custom fishing rods naturally. His small tackle shop, Severn Wharf Custom Rods, sits in a recently remodeled Gloucester Point strip mall and is part store, part museum, part workshop and part refuge for Drumheller.
Drumheller is an avid fisherman and is as comfortable with a rod and reel in the saltwater of Chesapeake Bay as he is in fresh water of mountain streams.
He also just happens to be as comfortable making rods for freshwater fly fishing as he is for offshore fishing. He’s as skilled at fixing antique bamboo rods as he is working with the latest materials like nanotube graphite that’s “super light and has got some good action,but they’re not as durable as they used to be.”
Drumheller has fished all over and even used to make annual fly fishing trips to Canada to catch stout salmon. It was when he retired from the U.S. Navy more than 20 years ago that he had plenty of time to pursue his dual passions for fishing and making things.
Drumheller got his start handcrafting custom fishing rods in the 1990swhen a friend who was a retired Navy senior chief offered to help him build his first fishing rod. “I was going to build one,” Drumheller says, emphasizing the word one. “When I did the first rod, he says, `That was pretty good for the first one.’ I’ve been doing it ever since.”
You could say that Drumheller trained his whole life for this. Drumheller was born and raised in Richmond. Yet every year he was off to the “rivah” when the long, hot days of summer hit. From the time he was a toddler and later through his youth, once school was out, Drumheller’s folks would drop him off at his great-grandparents’ cottage in Wake on the Rappahannock River.
To Drumheller, it was an outdoor paradise. Every day was a new adventure.
“I used to cry in the fall when they took me home to go to school,” Drumheller says with a wry smile.
His great-grandfather was a retired railroad engineer and a farmer who wintered in Florida and summered at his Middlesex County cottage that he had bought for $600 decades ago. As testament to its sturdiness, it survived the infamous 1933 hurricane that destroyed nearby houses. Drumheller’s summers revolved around the river,the bay, fishing and crabbing, notnecessarily in that order.
He also recalls with a grin a wonderful,albeit all too brief, experience as a boat owner. One day his great-grandfather gave him a small wooden boat and then his uncle supplied a motor. Is it any surprise that a youthful Drumheller had a little too much fun out in the Rappahannock with his new boat?
“The following weekend they took it away,” he says.
Following his graduation from high school, Drumheller began taking classes at John Tyler Community College. It wasn’t quite for him, however.
“After a couple of semesters, they told me not to come back,” Drumheller says.
With school not an option, Drumheller joined the U.S. Navy, specializing in electronics. After boot camp and training at Naval Station Great Lakes, Drumheller was stationed in Norfolk. Amazingly, he spent the next 19 years there, serving on several ships that included two destroyers and a tender.
“I just went ship to ship to ship,” Drumheller says. “Whatever I could do to stay.”
Drumheller retired from the Navy as a Chief Warrant Officer in 1995. He had moved in 1993 to a home in Gloucester down on a wide, quiet stretch of the Severn River.
When he took up crafting fishing rods, Drumheller took a liking to it.
“It was a challenge to build something that was functional and that was nice enough that someone would want to buy it,” Drumheller says.
With his customers, Drumheller finds out what they’re fishing for, drilling down to specifics such as preferences for lengths, sizes of handles, even whether they want cork, foam, or wood grips. Customers can even select the kind of wood—for example red cedar, which is light, or even pecan or persimmon or other varieties—that he turns on a lathe at his home.
“The best speckled trout fisherman in the bay come here,” Drumheller says.
He’s supplied tackle shops as far as Manhattan with his custom rods and his customers have included President George H.W. Bush, who has sent him several complimentary letters. “That lovely fishing rod has already seen action and it is terrific,” President Bush wrote to him once from Kennebunkport, Maine.
Which plays right into his company motto: “Made in Gloucester, fished everywhere.”
8109 Yacht Haven Road, Gloucester Point • 804-642-0404