Tenkara and Fly Fishing

Hmm, July 23, the calendar in my phone says, “Tenkara USA was sold” there are a couple of years entries for this, I wonder what year that was? 

How long ago did he sell the company?

Time is flying by…

Doesn’t matter, that’s water under the bridge, things are way different now.

It makes me think about why I stopped flying fishing to learn tenkara? Why did I? There are several reasons but the bottom line was I was at the top of my game making beautiful split cane fly rods. Writing about it, I was maintaining a couple of communities web sites on the subject, traveling and just having a ball but I stopped and even sold all my fly rods and reels.

What the f*€< was I thinking?

I could have just stored them in my closet. THAT would have been the better choice but I didn’t.

2009, fly fishing full stop. 

I completely immersed myself in tenkara and learned it from Japanese resources, working within that community to help Daniel build it. G~d I remember how difficult it was, the people new to tenkara and fishing, what they thought it was, the way they went about expressing themselves. 

They didn’t know very much about tenkara. The people in Japan best at it did fly fishing too. And they went fly fishing with their tenkara friends and it really didn’t matter. Tenkara wasn’t fly fishing, it was something different, a brother or sister, a sibling, a good friend, a close ally. I read the Japanese HP, the magazines, the genryu players there, far more hardcore than the best of the best fly fishers here, they climb waterfalls don’t they? 

…and catch trout in ultra clear skinny water. Some fly fish, some do tenkara, they don’t take sides, they exist together naturallly.

Tenkara in America today?

I don’t think so…

…and I’m going fly fishing this weekend. 

My tenkara rods left at home in the rod rack except the Nissin mini, that rod goes with me everywhere. Man what a beautifully engineered pure Japanese tenkara rod. I still crack up when I think about how certain Americans poo poo on it.

Whatever…

It is a machete AND a scalpel capable of dissecting a stream in short order, tenkara sews up a memory like a fine Italian suit. Btw,I wonder what the Italians think about fly fishing and tenkara coexisting?

Anyway, does not matter. 

The best tenkara people here also fly fish. The teachers, the authors, Dave Hughes, John Gerach, or locals like Chuck Kaminski, Chris Theobald, Andy Paschek. Even my nameless #1 tenkara fisher in the US, so proud of him. He just got back from genryu trips in Japan, I taught him tenkara now I’ll help him learn fly fishing for silvery glints off the beach in the surf. The English, Paul and John at Discover Tenkara, they fly fish and to date, their teachings are the best tenkara tuition English speaking people can get into. They do it right. Tenkara is Japanese and that’s where they base their approach carefully introducing this genre from that angle. 

But this weekend I’m going fly fishing!

I want to shoot some loops on a new 1-weight. It’s an 8’ 3 piece un-sanded blank, tip over butt ferrule and a nice flex profile.

Yeah, I’m fly fishing today with another old friend that I’ve known about 25 years. He is 70 something (I’m 63) The stream we are fishing; I’ve been fishing for 55 years. But I’m still learning, thinking about my wind game with that 1-weight, shooting loops in the nooks and crannies of that bendy stream, sending casts in big holes in the wind, it’s still a go!

Driving out of the desert into the mountains, my thoughts go from one thing to another. Connecting the dots is always on my mind but it’s a time of concentrating and at the same time letting go.

I’ve been watching some great TV in the evening, just finished Shogun, wow, so cool to understand old Japan, and I’m on the newest series of , “the Bear” a wild contemporary look at personalities in a great restaurant. Yeah, good stuff.

The Olympic games are on this month, in France! Yes, the French, Im cueing up one of my favorite rappers on my stereo, Octavian as I turn on to the freeway. The sun is rising, thoughts swirling in my head as they do on my drives to go fishing, ohh, there it is, the lyrics…

It's nice to be important

But it's important to be nice

Hell yeah!

That dude rocks, French rapper. Speaking of the French, I wonder if Chris Laurent fly fishes?

Doesn’t matter.

Driving, my Subaru is a perfect choice for me, road car, AWD for dirt roads. It just makes driving there not a big deal. I feel like I don’t deserve it. Nicest car I’ve owned. I worked hard for it and with the help of my wife, my family, I got one brand new! But I deserve it, my wife has one, why shouldn’t I? She said I should drive a new Bronco before I decide. My wife is good about those things.

Seems to me we missed the boat in America. 

Tenkara could have been piggybacked on fly fishing as a choice by showing how badass the Japanese genryu crew are, another tool in the arsenal of rods we use. Looking back, it’s easy to arm chair those things. It got big but we were looked at like beginners by the fly fishing community. 

Maybe because we were. 

A twenty something year old marketing a new way to fly fish? The marketing included, “sell your fly rod and get into it.” I told him this wasn’t the way, but it grew no less. I ended up on the payroll but you can’t tell me how to be me, that’s my job. Everything is behind me now and this is my story.

What’s yours?

We ended up at the Sowbug event in Arkansas. It’s a fly fishing community that has an annual regional fly tying get together. In Arkansas, they are serious about fly fishing, they catch big big browns in the local tailwaters, they know fly fishing. I was there with Daniel and the event coordinator must have recognized me as we shook hands, he looks at Daniel, “Oh, you brought the Sage with you…” I’m not sure who he was speaking to but I know Daniel didn’t like it. Doesn’t matter, we got tenkara rods into a lot of fly fishers hands. As much as I didn’t like the way he was doing it, he was doing it and besides, politics suck, we are still fishers and that’s the importance.

But Daniel left the building and now what do we have?

I don’t know, I really don’t care. 

He and Lefty Kreh figured it out and that’s a good thing.

I know that politics in fishing divides people. When you have people that say there is only one way to do it, already you start dividing. No, tenkara is not the only way to go fishing. You can’t learn tenkara by fly fishing or can you? In my case I stopped fly fishing and immersed myself into a world of Japanese tenkara. It’s from Japan, that’s where it came from, that’s where I had to go. All inroads lead me to the watersheds there and that’s where I went to learn it.

A Japanese fly fisher introduced me to the tenkara experts there. I would not have changed one thing about that.

Whoa whoa whoa, I’m on a road trip to go fly fishing. I don’t need to go there and do that.

It’s 2 something am. I’m in a hotel in Springerville Arizona. Tired from the day, we caught trout on the stream I’ve talked about. Nine thousand plus feet, elevation. I can feel the elevation just laying here but I’m so excited to be able to choose which rod to use. I remember distinctly breaking down little movements, kneeling, line handling, different ingrained movements. The little details, the reel taking away the anguish of bushwhacking a long level line, the rod length managing the downstream drift, so many differences. Today I like fly fishing and it feels great to be good at both. To be able to know the differences and to be able to talk about both.

Compare and contrast came into play but I pushed it out and enjoyed fly fishing for what it was.

It’s been a long time since I’ve operated a lite fly rod sending loops to capture trout in the cool mountain breeze.

Fun.

Try fly fishing.

You will get good at it fast.

I suggest a lite line fly rod.

Make friends with someone that does both.

That’s where it’s at.

Both.

If you do only one, learn the other. Don’t make a mistake and sell your gear to get into it. You’re going to want to do it latter.

Choices

Are

Best

Enjoy fishing your way.

Tenkara and Lite Line Fly Fishing

Light Line Fly Fishing is what interested me the most in fishing and ultimately lead me to tenkara. Why would I want to write a fly fishing piece on a tenkara site?

Because the two go hand in hand.

Tenkara is fly fishing, but it is different.

Lite line fly fishing, you can do everything you can do with a tenkara rod. I can see some of you immediately object and that's ok but hear me out, you can reach, just not as well, you can sasoi, just not as well but you cannot shoot a fly in a tunnel or let a big fish run, the obvious things, like you can with a fly rod.

Both have merit yet this is not about which one is better, this is about the small streams you fish and it is a rare look where both disciplines live in harmony.

Since day one for me, in 2009, fly fishing and tenkara have lived in unison. I was introduced to tenkara by an American company that said, "sell your fly rod and get into tenkara!"

Hell no, they got it wrong that day and never recovered. I ended up working for that company and it was a great experience. I always advised the group that fly fishing and tenkara were friends, brothers if you will and hand in hand they should exist. I advised the company NOT to engage with fly fisher people negatively and for the most part, bridges were mended instead of being burned, I'm proud of my association with them but that's water under the bridge, let me explain.

I didn't trust anyone outside of Japan to teach me anything about tenkara. I am capable of critical thinking on my own, I've always learned to go to the source and study, trusting my look at from a balanced standpoint. If I don't like something, I don't give it time, I don't engage or debate, that's far too much energy spent on the wrong thing.

So I decided to go to Japan and find out about tenkara on my own. I went in 2013, I was scheduled to go before but the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami prevented me from visiting the country while it was in duress. I continued to work with the Japanese and I visited my friend Satoshi Miwa, a humble fly fisher that wasn't interested in doing tenkara but he was quite helpful in my study of it. I had been introduced to the works of Yuzo Sebata and Kazuya Shimoda, expert tenkara fishers experienced with fly fishing. I had this idea in my mind that the Japanese loved fly fishing like we do in the West yet tenkara, born in Japan was Japan's contribution to the World of Fly Fishing. I had formed this opinion while reading old tenkara books, watching videos from Japanese home pages and as I wrote above, in my writings, detailed how tenkara is "Japanese style fly fishing" not in the sense that it is a discipline that should substituted for fly fishing but is an adjunct to it.

I had to learn tenkara, not a blend of fly fishing and tenkara or tenkara with a fly fisher's spin (pun intended) so I just quit fly fishing for more than a decade and dove right in and surrounded myself with the best tenkara fishers, media and friends that I could.

I feel like I did a good job.

Now I have returned to fly fishing while still retaining the freedom to choose what I want to do, the way that I want to fish. 

Many fly fisher people are not interested in tenkara and that's ok. I would say that they are ignorant, but it just isn't true. Fly fishing is pretty complete as it is yet they do not know how to make the fly dance as a tenkara fisher can.

So I show them and more times than not, I've introduced someone new to tenkara.

If you have been following along, genryu is the headwaters, keiryu is mountain stream fishing and honryu is mainstream fishing. All three can be done with a tenkara rod and or a fly rod. The term keiryu is simply, mountain stream fishing whereas genryu is a specialized area focused on the headwaters of the stream and honryu is the mainstream or river. A tenkara rod works best for keiryu and genryu and we can make it work for honryu. A specialized fly rod designed for each area works very well or a 7' - 8" 1-weight will work well for genryu and keiryu, for rivers, a slightly longer rod really works well. For honryu, tenkara rods are designed to work but there is a compromise in there somewhere whereas with a fly rod, they are much better suited.

You can do everything with a fly rod that a tenkara rod can do but not the other way around.

Yes, of course, there are exceptions but that's not where this article will focus on.

Prior to 2009, my specialty was 1-weight fly rods. 

If I were to suggest a fly rod to someone new to fly fishing, I would tell them what I've been telling many of you who I have helped into fly fishing, get a 9' 5-weight and go film yourself casting in the front lawn, watch videos and befriend a fly fisher and go to the river with them. A 5-weight line is like rope to those of us who fish level lines. That's an average line weight and as far as the rod length goes, that's a majority of the rod lengths as well. You can use that rod almost everywhere, light salt water, float tubing, rivers, streams, it works. If you continue on as the years go, I think you may end up like me with a 7' - 8' 1-weight. 

Why?

The 1-weight is a light line specialty rod that has been accepted as a specialty. It's not a proprietary line weight such as a 0, 00 or even the 000-weight rod. One company went in that direction and as far as a capable rod, they are however, you are locked into THAT company and what they offer. Many companies offer a 1-weight and it is by far, the lightest and most produced configuration of the industry. You could make the same argument for say a 2-weight or even a 3-weight but those rods are NOT the lightest line weight somewhat readily available whereas the 1-weight line, which is actually what this is about is produced by several fly line companies and has stood the test of time.

I know many of you are waiting for Euro-nymphing to be mentioned, here it is. Euro-nymphing is a conglomeration of techniques, a specialty of subspecialties. It is a frankenfishing, a conglomeration of techniques type genre and without giving a class on Euronymping, I am going to center my thoughts here on conventional (yet specialized) fly fishing without going in a direction of opinion. Euro nymphing is popular. So are bad politicians and that's enough on that topic.

I've seen 1-weight fly rods range from 5'6" to 9'. I've used 1-weight rods in those lengths and have come to the conclusion that a rod of 7'6" to 8' is the sweet spot. It will do the most and is the configuration that I choose in order to maximize what I want out of a 1-weight. On the topic of length, a short fly rod will do almost everything a long rod will except manipulate a line once cast. The short length degrades the ability to mend line in a stealthy manner and in addition, as the length of the rod goes shorter, from my experience, in order to make that short rod (5'6" to 6'6") I have to go up in line weight in order to get the performance I desire from that length fly rod. 

I have a whole other subspecialty on short fly rods that I could draw from but what I'm trying to do here is to divorce the tenkara specialty person from a "tenkara only" outlook and marry him or her to the idea of a broader sense of lite line fly fishing that keiryu is.

At one point in my history of fishing 1-weights, I hunted big fish. I'm not proud of that time, I did learn a lot about catching but it took me away from why I enjoy fishing. I found that it addictive and once I began to zero in on big fish, that's all I wanted and that's not the reason why I enjoy fly fishing.

My project here is not to teach you but to share in what I do.

My experience with lite line fly fishing is that it is not un-common. Japanese fishers enjoy fly fishing more than tenkara. In Japan, tenkara is not popular like fly fishing or conventional tackle configurations with spin and bait cast rods made for keiryu. As I wrote above, on my first trip to Japan, I visited with a fly-fishing friend who toured the different watersheds in the central alps. We did a trip based on his small stream fly fishing, yet I fished side by side and we caught just about the same amount and type of fish. Miwa san wrote an article on our trip, "American Tenkara Fisher, Japanese Fly Fisher" and described his experience fishing with me.

So, my experience is to suggest that 9' 5-weight to you. It will be easy to cast and to learn the different techniques in fly fishing but if you want a rod that lives in the same keiryu environment as does tenkara, I suggest a 8' 1-weight. It may take you some time to get there but once you do, we can talk.

Take care and enjoy fishing your way.