Tenkara Summit 2012 to be held in Utah.

July 27-28, 2012.
Day 1: Salt Lake City, clinics and speakers
Day 2: Wasatch Mountain Range, demos and guided trips

Please RSVP here: www.tenkarausa.com/summit
UPDATE: Special participation by Dr. Hisao Ishigaki

Just got the new plates for the Tenkaramobile. Can you guess what car it is?

The first person to answer what car this license plate is on will receive a box with 6 flies that I’ll personally tie. – update: the prize has been given.

UPDATE (11/29): Most people were super close! I actually agonized for days on whether to put the plates on my Subaru Outback, which really is the mountain car, or on the Prius which is my environmentally-friendly business car. In the end the “TENKARA” plate went on the Prius, and Paul will be getting the flies – Paul, send me an email with your address please.

Chris’ answer would have gotten the “most original answer” prize if we had one, and Steve’s would have gotten the “smart-ass” price…=))

I use the Prius much more than the Subaru these days, so it will get more visibility for the tenkara plate. It’s also the car used for business purposes; it started as a vehicle for running errands around town, going to business meetings, etc, but then it was hard to not take the Prius on the longer fishing trips – ah, the pleasure of getting 43 miles per gallon! Even though it has much less clearance and is not a 4WD, it’s hard to beat the gas savings. Although it’s nice to have clearance and 4-wheel traction – and a couple of times I thought I would get stuck in places where I was so used to driving into with the Subaru without a second thought – most places don’t really require 4WD and high-clearance and  the Prius has proven trustworthy as the tenkaramobile.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing an online forum and saw our good friend Troutrageous! posting a plan for a tenkara rod rack. He is a passionate angler and wanted to proudly display his tenkara rods. Though I hardly ever post on forums, I knew a good solution to this one!

Quite sometime ago I was trying to figure out a good method for selling our rods through fly shops. The solution to this problem alluded me for quite sometime since tenkara rods don’t display well next to western fly rods and their portability is a feature that I wanted to display that properly. While I worked on concepts for our Point-of-Sale display I would visit a lot of stores of different types to look for inspiration. In one of these outings, to a major sporting goods store, I noticed a pool cue rack in one of the aisles. The picture on the package automatically made me think of displaying tenkara rods in one, either for my own office or for the POS in our dealers. I bought one, brought it home, and in the same evening had another concept in mind. I got to work on that concept and never installed the pool cue rack.

That original inspiration came in handy when I saw Mike’s (Troutrageous!) post online. I suggested he look into pool cue racks, and next thing I knew he had one neatly installed at home! He bought one for $9.46 and with that created a neat tenkara corner in his house.

While we never quite expected so many of our customers to own multiple rods – though we should have known better – the tenkara rod rack concept has inspired a couple of other folks to do the same and create some very neat displays.

Jason Klass, of Tenkara Talk, followed suit creating a display for an impressive 10 tenkara rods! He installed in his a corner of his “man cave” and made a neat display also with the net, and rod cases and books below:

Today I was happy to see yet another passionate tenkara angler doing the same. Karel Lansky of Tenkara On The Fly went over to WalMart and acquired his own tenkara rod rack. He, like Mike, adorned the display with one of Joel DeJong’s prints – a great addition to any corner dedicated to that spiritual thing we call fishing! Here’s Karel’s display:

This is way cool!

Of course, maybe I should have just bought all the pool cue racks, renamed them tenkara rod racks and sold them along with the rods! Let us know when you do yours!

On this Veteran’s day Tenkara USA sends a special thanks for all men and women who have served this country. We have been very proud to fish with you in the last few years – showing tenkara fly-fishing to you has been a great honor.

As we near the end of fishing season and I looked for more things to do around here, I saw several branches sitting in the garage and decided it was time to resume my tenkara net making.

Until earlier this year I spent a lot of time working on tenkara nets in my free time. I got about a dozen made and learned a lot along the way. Some were very exquisite, some I consider a learning experiment and a couple that I’m super proud of, like this and this. Then, time became very scarce, and I took a break. I was able to cut and work on a couple of branches when I was spending time in Japan. I also spent invaluable time with a master net maker in Japan, where I learned a lot that I have been hoping to put into use since my return. But, I just couldn’t find the time.

When I first learned that the recommended amount of time for drying and seasoning branches was about one year, I thought that was crazy and I would never be able to wait that long to work on them. That was true for my first few nets, but now I realize one year goes by extremely fast and that is very noticeable when you have a marker such as a net waiting to be worked on. A few branches were collected over a year ago and have been drying since. I had been really looking forward to working on a couple of them and am truly excited to get to work. These are the two waiting to be finished:

Whereas last year I worked from a tiny corner in my office, this year I moved to a new place and found some space in the garage to setup a proper working area. I still don’t need many tools to do it, but this will keep my wife happy and my office much less dusty. I’m truly excited to get to work on them again, in a proper space this time.

Soon after I setup my working area I had a chance to visit an area I knew to have the right types of trees – I use Jeffrey Pine – and a grove where many of the trees tend to have branches with the right shape. For an entire day I must have inspected every single tree in the area, and the work paid off with 14 new branches. These will not be considered nets for at least one year, as I now must remove their bark, steam them into shape, let them dry…splice their arms and join them, then sand, sand, sand, and finish.
This should keep me busy for a while.

People often ask me if I sell these nets or what will I do with them. Tenkara nets for me are just a hobby, a new passion that keeps me from having “down times”, something I don’t feel is work. If I’m bored, or a bit depressed, I just work on them and time goes by quickly. A couple have found themselves to the hands of people that earned them and I hope to give a few more away down the road. But, the main justification I have found for devoting to much time to this craft goes back to what my grandfather has always said to me, “knowledge is the only thing no one can ever take away from you.” It is very nice to have a skill, something that I can do with my hands and very few tools. Should the world go totally nuts I guess I can become a professional angler and trade fish and nets for other food and necessities.

Like many of other people out there, I’m currently reading Steve Job’s biography. It’s an incredible story. I decided to read it for numerous reasons: Jobs was a brilliant businessman, with a very interesting life story, and his company had created products that embodied simplicity in their design and their functionality.
For many years I have been interested in product design, particularly the clean lines of Japanese design – old and new. Before I started Tenkara USA I was very excited when my brother started studying product design, and tried to convince him to spend some time in Japan, though he never did.
Today I read an interesting passage in the book about the philosophy of Jonathan Ive, the designer for Apple’s recent products (and who, coincidentally, shares his first name with my brother). Great food for thought, and can be very well interpreted for tenkara:

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

- Jonathan Ive, from the book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Another thought, when I discovered tenkara nets, I became enamored with their simplicity of design and origin. And, at the same time, with their functionality which is vastly superior to that of a western fly fishing net. And – not kidding – I have often said in my presentations about them, that I thought if we went to the people at Apple and asked them to design a fly-fishing net from scratch they would probably do something similar to a tenkara net.