A quick, 1 minute video of today’s outing with my wife and our dog.
Watch in HD, click the gear icon and select 1080!
 

John Geer and I went to Missoula, Montana to attend the Orvis Guide Rendezvous over the last couple of days. We were invited to share tenkara with the Orvis network of guides, since they will likely be getting a lot of inquiries about tenkara rods and the tenkara method of fishing now that we are being featured on a full page of the Orvis catalog. We had 2 hours yesterday to sneak out and fish the nearby rivers. You have to watch the video to see the enormous fish John is holding at the end, he says it felt like a kayaker was pulling him.

 

Tenkara rod: Tenkara USA Amago
Tenkara line: 4.5 level line
Tenkara fly: Oki Sakasa Kebari
Tenkara net: hands and teeth!

Ashton Chatelain of hintsofemergence.com has submitted a good entry to the Tenkara Summit Video Contest. Sure, it is taking a slight jab at the pointless “what is tenkara?” discussions, and perhaps even a light-hearted jab at us, but as I once read somewhere, “those who don’t laugh at themselves leave the job to others.”

Mike Agneta, the cool blogger at troutrageous.com, has submitted his entry for a free trip to the Tenkara Summit 2013.

 

Please remember, the sooner you submit your video the better the chance of accumulating more views. AND, we recommend uploading your video to one video source and encouraging friends to visit that one video (rather than splitting your video views). We will not add view counts from multiple videos, and will only consider the one with highest number of views.

We just received the first submission in response to our video contest for winning a free trip to the 2013 Tenkara Summit.

Matt Shipp did a great job, showing our products (1 point), having a conservation message (1 point) and submitting it EARLY (a great way to get more views, which can add another 6 points). We’re looking forward to seeing more videos submitted. For details on the contest visit: http://www.tenkarausa.com/blog/?p=4604.

About this video:
Yesterday, March 8th, I decided I had spent enough time looking at my computer. It was time to go fishing.

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Margaret will have to forgive me for having fun with some video clips I captured on my iphone while we visited Colorado a couple of weeks ago. This video was too good not to share.

While stopping for lunch in Breckenridge, Colorado, we noticed a good number of fish in the stream that runs through town. I was not sure we should fish for them, they were right in the middle of town. But, my wife, Margaret, suggested we try it.

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On my last post I said the off-topic post would not set the precedent to talking about funny cats. But, I could not have predicted the future. In this hillarious video, 6-year old Jack (son of John, from tenkaraguides.com) gives us some great lessons on tenkara, covering the importance of casting accuracy, enticing a take, fly manipulation and how to land a fish.

In May 2010, Daniel Galhardo, founder of Tenkara USA, spent 2 weeks in Japan learning more about tenkara, and fishing with two of the most renowned tenkara masters in the country, Dr. Hisao Ishigaki, and Sakakibara Masami (aka Tenkara no oni). Daniel captured some of their lessons on tenkara casting, and presentation/fly manipulation techniques. After about one year the video was finally edited into something at least presentable.
We hope you will pick up a couple of the tricks in the video, and most importantly learn what tenkara, the Japanese method of mountain stream fly fishing, looks like. Many more lessons were learned, but only so much can be shared in one video.
The events shown took place in the Itoshiro River area, Gifu Prefecture.

Tenkara Masters – Lessons with Dr. Ishigaki and Sakakibara Masami from Tenkara USA on Vimeo.

Daniel will be heading to Japan again in May, this time for 2 months. He will be documenting much of this trip as he visits the country and will be posting regularly. Please keep checking tenkarausa.com/blog for updates from May 10 through June 30th.

Following up on Dr. Hisao Ishigaki’s visit to the Catskills in May, we just posted a movie preview of our upcoming movie on Dr. Ishigaki’s visit marking the introduction of tenkara to the US.

During his visit, Dr. Ishigaki did a fly-tying demonstration of the one and ONLY pattern he’s used for almost 10 years, a “sakasa” fly pattern (reversed hackle). He first learned about this fly in a shop in Japan, and after some years of fishing several different patterns was quickly attracted to its simplicity,sparseness, and soon its effectiveness. It’s a very simple and quick fly to tie.

This one-fly approach puzzled many of the present guests, particularly since he expressed his philosophy and theories in an area known for its fly-tiers and the invention of a multitude of fly-patterns. A doctor in the field of vision studies, Dr. Ishigaki bases his theory on the fact that a fish’s vision is very poor, and it will go for anything moving nearby, and also on the fact that despite of only using one fly-pattern he’s continued to catch as many fish as he ever did when using several different patterns. The instincts of a trout won’t allow it to waste an opportunity to grab food.

As Dr. Ishigaki says, in tenkara “it’s all about technique; whether one catches fish or not is entirely up to him, not the gear, not even the fly.” The main appeal of tenkara to Dr. Ishigaki and many other tenkara anglers is its simplicity. He fully embraces the simplicity in fishing with only a rod, line and a fly. But, he takes it further than many dare.

The idea of limiting yourself to only the most basic elements of fly-fishing and fully dedicating yourself to technique and presentation is appealing! This experience really got me thinking, what if I could only carry one fly? Would I still be able to catch fish? It is hard, VERY HARD in fact, to stick with only one fly. I have been trying it, but it takes a level of confidence, or discipline, I don’t yet have.

John Steinback once wrote, “It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming”. Maybe intelligence also involves selecting the right fly, but, maybe switching flies is just…the easy way out.