There’s a stroke of sheer genius manifest in the current tenkara movement.
More and more I hear tenkara being marketed, often to fly-curious non-fishers, as the simple way to fly fish. It’s you, the rod, a fixed length line and a fly.
You have to admit, it is a profoundly beautiful, simple construct and barriers to (fly fishing) entry – namely cost and negotiating the maze of rods, reels, lines and leaders today – almost magically vanish according to many tenkara gurus.
Simplicity.
Funny, my fly fishing mentor (JW) nailed the simplicity game, indelibly for me at least, one unseasonably chilly late September afternoon on an intentionally-here-unnamed honey creek in Utah’s Heber Valley.
It happened to be 1985, a few decades ahead of the enlightened North American tenkara age.
He said to bring my 4-wt. rigged with a 12-foot leader, one spool of tippet material and three flies (small water dry attractors) in a plastic film container. No waders, no multiple boxes, no vest. Everything had to fit in a single pocket.
[Digression – for those confused by the term “plastic film container”, cameras back in the day actually used a long, strangely textured, opaque material called film. It most often came in a little yellow box which housed a black plastic cylinder about the size of your thumb with a grey, snap on lid, holding “the film” in an ingenious metal can. After exposure in your camera, you took said film to a magic place, where through the wonders of modern chemistry, said film was processed into slides which you then showed your friends, with some pomp and circumstance, on a large section of your living room wall.
For all the technical advantages of digital photography and high-tech gear, nothing has yet matched the anticipation of loading a stack of slides for viewing the first time.]
JW proceeded to lead us, off trail and using painfully long strides up a damned steep ridge, to a small meadow stream, still grass-lined that fall, with deep undercut banks.
Here he demonstrated like a Jedi master the art of what used to be called dapping back in those prehistoric PT days (pre-tenkara). We crawled upon and fished undercut, outside bends and pools at the ends of riffle runs. There’s probably several modern tenkara terms (from the Japanese of course) to describe what we did that day; JW just called it fishing the crick.
The crick was small enough neither of us needed to cast with more than the leader out of the rod tip for 98% of the day, though it was nice to be able to unspool a bit of line, make one cast to drop one in a tight lane, up and over the riffle on the far side. We caught 4 to 6-inch spunky rainbows all afternoon, as fly-innocent as the day is long, until we realized the sun had already dropped below the ridge line.
And there were a couple of leviathan 15-inchers that slammed up out of the deepest undercuts that left our hands shaking and hearts pounding that afternoon. (Unless you’re a small crick fisher you probably scoffed at that last sentence; if you are, you damned well know what I’m talking about…)
If tenkara rigs were available, we’d probably have used them that day. As JW mentored ably that afternoon, pursuit of simplicity itself is the cornerstone choice, gear becomes a secondary game.
I like simplicity.
