Here are some pictures of my recent trip to Colorado, 5 days of tenkara!

Although I never fish in lakes, as I hiked past a lake I noticed this Greenback Cutthroat cruising about 30ft from the shore. Too much to resist

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The tenkara community in Colorado is very passionate, and for that reason I had been meaning to come back for quite sometime – plus, Colorado does have a lot of tenkara-perfect waters!

Jason Klass of of tenkaratalk.com (Jason already has a couple of posts of this trip), and Karel Lansky of tenkaraonthefly.net have been spreading the word fast and wide in the state. As they continue to spread tenkara, I wanted to see if I could show them anything new. I booked a ticket to Denver, posted the announcement on his blog, and I did a post on our forum. On Saturday, we had the 15 anglers meet at Rocky Mountain National Park.

Most of the participants already practiced tenkara, and due to the very evident passion of the other 12, 3 anglers have certainly decided to switch – despite the lack of fish, and the wind!

Oh, the wind…It was a very windy day in the park. But it worked out okay as I was able to show clearly that with good technique tenkara does work in the wind too. Jason just posted a short video preview on his site.  After the initial workshop, which we held at the Roaring River, a few people split off, and five of us headed to the Big Thompson. I was very proud of the group, their casting improved dramatically and I think we covered a lot of good information.In all we had a great time talking, sharing experiences and just enjoying the amazing background:

THANK YOU TO ALL THOSE WHO CAME!

Scheduled to post on Wednesday morning: select pictures of my trip to Colorado. Got some good shots I believe, including: Greenback Cutthroats (swimming and feeding 3 feet away from me), good pictures of South Platte River, and just general landscap shots. Please check the blog again on Wednesday.

The first Tenkara Summit in the US is only 2 days away! Can we accomodate over 150 people?

Dr. Ishigaki landed in San Francisco today. We had an enjoyable day, and he’s very excited about the summit. He also brought some very cool items for our auction and giveaways!

It’s very late, 12:50 AM to be exact. We will leave the house at 6:30AM tomorrow, I figure I can manage on about 5 hours of sleep this time. I’m so excited, can’t stop doing last minute things. I prepared some auction sheets for the higher value items (bamboo rod, tenkara net, etc!). Then, I became curious about how many people are actually coming and decided to tally it up. I knew it was near 100. But, we have 119 people registered!!!  This number doesn’t even take into account my own party, speakers, a handful of people I know will be there, and a few drop-ins. Can we expect about 150 people? We may actually not have room for so many guests. For what I hear we may end up getting more people than most fly-fishing shows these days.

The stats are also cool: we have people from 4 countries coming especially for the event, including Japan (of course), Canada, Italy and Norway. There are people from 23 different states registered too, and I know most booked a flight especially to be there.

I’m simply stunned. It’s kind of funny because I have never been very good at throwing parties. But, this is looking like it will be a heck of an event – but don’t expect a super well organized event….I have no idea what the heck I’m doing.

See you there!

*** PS. Orders are being shipped as normal through our automated fulfillment, however, no customer service will be provided from tomorrow (August 25th) until we return on August 30th.

Around January of this year the vision for a tenkara gathering started taking place, now the first Tenkara Summit in the US is only one week away! For more information about the event, or to RSVP, please visit: www.tenkarausa.com/summit

How the event originated?

Last September I had been invited to speak about tenkara at the Ennis Fly Fishing Festival. It was my first visit to Montana. As one would expect, fishing was absolutely great, and it was a tenkara-perfect state. About one week after the festival, Dr. Ishigaki visited California. Still excited about my visit to Montana I showed him many of the photographs of my trip. He returned to Japan, and soon asked me if I could arrange for him to speak about tenkara in Montana. Not being able to match the dates he was available with any existing events, I thought the best way to go about it would be to organize our own, the Tenkara USA Summit.

Who is coming?

At the moment there are about 100 people registered for the event, which is free of charge and being held in West Yellowstone on August 27th. In addition to visitors, we’re counting on the honorable presence of Dr. Hisao Ishigaki, as well as the enriching presence of guest speakers and participants such as Chris “Tenkara Bum” Stewart, Craig Mathews of the Blue Ribbon Flies and our retailer in the area, authors Kevin Kelleher and Misako Ishimura, Ryan Jordan from Backpackinglight.com, Tenkara guide Tom Sadler, and more.

What will be happening there? When?

A detailed scheduled is available here. I’ll kick off the event at 8AM on Saturday, the speakers listed above will give a presentation on their topics.

We’ll have lunch at around 12pm (sandwich buffet will be available at the hotel, a donation of $12 will be requested for those wishing to eat at the event to cover the cost of the lunch). At lunch time we’ll be holding a raffle and silent auction, among some great items there will be an authentic tenkara net from Japan, a complete tenkara gear of rod, line, line holder, flies and and the exclusive UL tenkara net and ebira rod quiver which were donated by Thom Darrah from Trail Lite Design, and more.

Then, guests will be welcomed to drive to a nearby stream for an on-stream tenkara demonstration. This is not going to be a fishout, but rather a great opportunity to see what tenkara really looks like. Most people use tenkara the way they would use western fly-fishing equipment, and may lose out on some of the refinements of the technique, I strongly encourage you to join us for this portion of the event.

Will gear be available for purchase at the event?

This is not a sales event and items will be available but on a VERY LIMITED quantity. Blue Ribbon Flies will be selling our gear at the event, and items will definitely be available for trying out, but do not expect any guarantee to get your gear during the event. If you’re interested in any particular items, or would like to guarantee you have a rod in Montana, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you purchase it ahead of the summit, through our site or Blue Ribbon Flies and later exchange if you saw something that you wanted instead.

In addition, we just received some very cool t-shirts with artwork by Anthony Naples (see first picture on top of this post) to celebrate the event. These will be available for purchase at our table.

Backpackinglight, Blue Ribbon Flies, Tenkara Bum, and other partners may have additional items for sale too.