Yesterday I took 10-year old Sofi tenkara fishing for her first time. She emailed me last week to ask if I could teach her tenkara for her “Dream Homework” assignment. On Monday she attended a presentation I gave at the Boulder REI. It was real cool to see how interested and engaged she was.

While fishing, what impressed me the most was how intuitive she was. I gave her a rod and just told her to get her tenkara fly “out there”, pointing to the calm water near some currents. She did in less than a minute with no instruction. A few minutes later, she spontaneously started manipulating the fly – and she did it perfectly too. It was quite astounding. The fishing was pretty slow, I believe because of pressure changes, but she did manage to land a nice brown within 15 minutes of us picking up the rod for the first time.

Guest post by John Vetterli, of Tenkaraguides.com

I don’t know how many of you have seen the short video Daniel made of my 6 year old son Jack practicing casting his 11’ Iwana and tormenting our cat. That short video was the first time Jack had cast with his new tenkara rod.

I have learned some valuable lessons from teaching my 9 year old daughter Sage and 6 year old son Jack how to fish with tenkara rods. I want to share these lessons because like most tenkara anglers with kids, I immediately saw the potential for bringing my kids into the tenkara world for a lifetime of fun and learning.
Read the rest of this entry »