Ok, I was always under the impression that a dry fly rod was a softer action taper. A rod like a Winston TMF. A rod that would present a dry fly softly up close. This made sense to me.

Now that i've turned to fishing with just bamboo i've gotten into all the rod makers old and new and all the different tapers. Now i've discovered that a bamboo dry fly rod means something different. A bamboo dry fly rod is a faster action to make false casting to dry the fly easier. Is this because they didn't have the floatants we have now? Yet a modern bamboo maker will still call a fast action rod a dry fly rod.

What am I missing here? Isn't the way a rod presents the fly more important than how it false casts? In a graphite rod you don't think of of a fast rod as a dry fly rod. Is the term dry fly rod different between graphite and bamboo?