SPRING 2015

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Tenkara Fishing 22

Changing Ocean Conditions and

Steelhead Declines 34

Dangle Nymphing Stillwaters 46

WhatDubbing? 52

Fair Trade Flies 18

Simplicities of Trout Fishing 40

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C O N T E N T Swww.amatobooks.com

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

LIKE COFFEE FOR FLIES 18—Jeff Coffey

TENKARA FISHING 22—Morgan Lyle

SALMONFLY 26—Bryan Gregson

LOST AT SEA 34—Don Roberts

6 SIMPLICITIES OFTROUT FISHING 40—Dave Hughes

DANGLE NYMPHINGSTILLWATERS 46—Michael Gorman

WHAT DUBBING? 52—Al Ritt

FROM THE EDITOR 6—Rob Crandall

GUIDE PROFILE 8—Dave Kilhefner

KEEPING IT REEL 10—Readers

RIDDLES OF THE HATCH 12—Dave Hughes

FISHING TRAVEL 14—Eric Schoenborn

NEW PRODUCTS 16—Preston Singletary

GEAR-UP 32—Staff

PATENT PATTERNS 58—Readers

TAILOUT 62—Tom Alkire

About the COVER:T S S. B G

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DAVE HALL ARTWORK

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Morgan Lyle

When Daniel Galhardo gave a talk last fall at

a meeting of the High Plains Drifters, the Denver chapter of the Federation of Fly Fishers, he asked how many of the 100 or so in attendance had heard of tenkara. Almost every hand went up. About one in three had actually used the telescoping, fixed-line fly rods.

9-foot 5-weight and the Spey rod. A few have sworn off rod-and-reel fishing for good and devoted themselves to the fixed line.

Now, largely with Galhardo’s encouragement, there’s a growing number of tenkara anglers with no fly-fishing experience at all. He sees potential tenkara anglers in backpackers, mountain bikers and other outdoorsy types whose first priority isn’t fishing, but who often find themselves near trout streams.

“People who would not have done any fly-fishing at all have fallen in love with fly-fishing because of tenkara,” Galhardo said. For example, “here in Boulder, there’s a new group called the Tenkara Fly Girls, 15-20 women mostly in their mid 20s to late 30s. They’ve never held a fly rod before, and now they’re absolutely in love with fly-fishing.”

Chris Stewart, aka the TenkaraBum, agrees. The New York-based owner of TenkaraBum.com, which offers a wide range of imported tenkara rods, flies and gear, said he hears from custom-ers with zero fly-fishing experience.

“I don’t know what the percentage is, because most of them don’t say, but I do get enough people who do say, ‘I’ve never fly-fished before and this just looks like a neat thing to do,’” Stewart

Tenkara Fishing

That’s a big change from a few years ago, when the founder of Tenkara USA first started making appearances at fishing clubs to explain a style of fishing that was foreign to most American anglers. Back then, a show of one or two hands was more typical.

Despite being dismissed as a fad by one of the country’s best-known fly-fishers and branded a cult by a popular blogger, tenkara has established itself. Orvis, Temple Fork Outfitters and Patagonia now carry at least some tenkara tackle. Dozens of web-based businesses now sell tenkara rods, lines, flies and ac-cessories. Luminaries including John Gierach, Dave Hughes and Kirk Deeter elevated tenkara’s profile with thoughtful writing. Reel-less anglers can now be found snapping casts into pocket water from coast to coast, catching lots of trout.

Reel makers probably have no cause to worry. Still, tenkara appears to be here to stay—a legit specialty in a sport that in-creasingly embraces specialization.

Most of the first American tenkara anglers were veteran fly-fishers who liked tenkara’s effectiveness as much as its stripped-down simplicity, and probably its novelty and cool factor, too. Many consider it another weapon in the quiver, alongside the

Masaki Nakano fi shes the Gallatin River in Montana.Long, limber tenkara rods will protect light tippets from fi ghting trout. Chris Stewart, TenkaraBum.com

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said. “I don’t know how large it is, but that’s definitely a market segment.”

Newbies like tenkara because it’s simple and intuitive. Long-time fly-fishers like it because it’s a great way to catch trout.

Tenkara TackleThe basic set-up is familiar to most of us by now: a telescoping rod, less than two feet long when collapsed, 12 feet or even longer when fully extended. To the tip of the rod is attached a line most western anglers would think of as a leader—either a braided, tapered line that casts like a miniature western-style fly line, or a level simply high-vis fluorocarbon from around 12-pound test (for larger or stiffer rods) to 2X (for the lighter or softer rods) or even smaller.

A few people have sneered about tenkara rods resembling crap-pie rods or cane poles (not that there’s anything wrong with either), but the difference is tenkara rods have tapers designed to cast such

a light line in nice tight loops, with accuracy, delicacy and stealth. As with western fly rods, the sweetest tapers are found on the high-end models; you can spend $500 on a good Japanese tenkara rod. They are indeed sweet to cast, but the difference between them and less expensive rods is subtle. Most tenkara rods cost $250 or less, some of them much less, and they cast just fine.

By the way, tenkara rods are collapsible because they have to be. If you have a line attached to the tip of a rod whose sections are held together by ferrules, and you hook a good fish, your tip section may well pop right off. The tenkara fishermen of old in Japan, who fished for food and for money, used rods made of whole stalks of bamboo. Rather than lug around a 12-foot rod, they used sections of the tapered stalk, with a small one slipped in through the butt end of the next biggest section and poking out of the narrower top, its own wider butt section anchored inside the section below. A typical modern graphite tenkara rod has nine sections, including the handle.

Tenkara USA founder Daniel Galhardo, right, with Japanese tenkara expert

Hisao Ishigaki and a couple of Madison River trout. Courtesy Tenkara USA

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It’s nice that you can easily pull all the sections out to dry or clean them. It’s also nice that you can replace them if they break (which most often happens to the spaghetti-fine tip sections through clumsy collapsing or trying to yank a stuck fly free.)

Fishing TechniquesA tippet, typically three or four feet of 5X or 6X, is tied to the end of the line. And to that is tied the fly—pretty much any fly you like, though true tenkara uses unweighted wet flies, much like soft hackles in U.K. and here in the States. Tenkara rods fish dry flies, emergers and moderately weighted nymphs just as well as wets. You can fish heavier nymphs with them, too. If you do a lot of deep nymphing, a stiffer rod will make hook-sets easier.

I don’t much like using stream-ers on tenkara rods. Being able to strip a fly line allows you to cover a lot more water, and you don’t have to move the rod to make the fly move. But it’s fun to tie on a small Woolly Bugger and twitch it around with the rod tip, if you think there might be a fish nearby.

Most tenkara fishing is simply old-fashioned high-sticking. This is where the light line is a huge advan-tage over a droopy PVC line. If you can get within 25 feet of your fish, you can drift a dry fly or emerger over it with practically no line lying on the water at all—and therefore no drag.

That’s why so many European-style competition fly-fishers use long rods with soft tips and very long leaders. Much of the time their fly lines stay coiled on their reels; only the leader goes through the guides. The anglers keep their rod tips high and flick their flies into every possible spot that could hold a trout. I’ve observed a couple of these competitions, and I was struck by how much the technique had in common with tenkara fishing.

I’ve done a lot of this kind of fishing, and it’s extremely effec-tive. You can reach right over intervening currents. You can drop a fly in the eddy behind a rock and keep it there as long as you want. Even a modestly weighted nymph will drop quickly to fishing depth when the leader is more vertical than horizontal. You never need to mend line or use a strike indicator.

What’s the maximum cast? A typical tenkara rod is 12 feet long. Some tenkara anglers specialize in the use of long lines, but most of us stick to a line that’s not much longer than the rod, to make it easier to land fish. So figure 14 feet of line, plus maybe four feet of tippet. That would add up to 30 feet if the whole rig was in a straight line—and you can certainly fish it that way if the situation calls for it. But since most of the time the rod slopes up and the line slopes down, the cast will be somewhere around 25 feet.

When I started using tenkara rods, I was delighted to discover how many trout were within 25 feet.

Tenkara CastingFor a veteran fly-fisher, the first casts with a tenkara rod can be a little puzzling. Getting the maximum distance, such as it is, requires a little practice. The key is to make a high stop on the forward cast. Then follow the line down quickly enough that it doesn’t have time to droop. It’s easier to do than to explain, and once you get the feel, it’s second nature.

The back and forward casts are short and quick. You don’t need to move the rod tip far to toss such a short line, so forget “10 and

2”—it’s more like 11:30 to 12:45. Sidearm casting is just as easy as overhead. Often all you need is a wa-ter haul; let the fly drift all the way downstream, give a good tug against the surface tension and fling it right back upstream. Tenkara rods are great for the Joe Humphreys-style bow-and-arrow cast, too.

I like casting a western fly line as much as the next guy, but when I’m tenkara fishing, I don’t miss it. I’m completely focused on the water and my fly. I think not having to mend and manage a fly line allows me to devote more attention to the actual fishing. Of course, it cuts both ways. There are times when I can’t reach water I want to fish. Still, most of the time on high-gradient, small or moderate streams, I can find plenty of targets.

Playing and Landing FishThe long, limber design of a ten-kara rod will absorb a trout’s lunges and protect the tippet until the fish calms down enough for you to pull it in. In my experience, this hap-pens more quickly with a tenkara

rod than it does when a trout is allowed to pull line from a reel. I’m not sure why.

Landing the fish is simple. If your line and tippet are about the same length as your rod, all you need to do to land a fish is reach back with the rod when the time is right. The trout will slide right over to your net.

If you’re using a line longer than the rod, you’ll probably have to hand-line it. I was worried about doing that, but it proved not to be a problem. If the fish freaks out while you’re pulling the leader in by hand, you can simply let go and let the trout fight the rod a little more. Eventually it will settle down.

Early on, I broke off a husky bass that had grabbed my nymph. The line was tight as a banjo string, and I didn’t have the nerve to wait. I took the leader by the hand too soon. Had I been more patient and waited until the fish was ready, I probably would have landed it.

Ben Furimsky took this trout with a tenkara rod on the Gunnison River in Colorado. Courtesy of Tenkara USA

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happens in tenkara fishing. While you’re free to fish any fly you like, true tenkara fishing uses a virtually weightless wet fly, and would be recognized immediately as fly-fishing by any trout fisher prior to the 1700s, when reels came into common use. Tenkara is what fly-fishing looked like for centuries before that.

QUESTION:

So how do you reel-in a fish when you have no reel?

Learn at www.tenkarausa.com/reel-in

or call us at 888–483–6527

When fighting a large fish, it’s important to keep your rod up. I learned this the hard way on a small, wild-trout tailwater in the lower Hudson Valley in New York. My caddis pupa pattern drifted into a sweet pocket and I felt the unmistakable pull of a good-sized fish. Had I reared back and put a big bend in the rod, I would have stood a good chance. Instead, still in the habit of expecting the fish to pull line from a reel, I held the rod in a shallower arc. With no springy bend, the tippet snapped. Since then, my strategy has been to show the fish the butt of the rod. It hasn’t let me down.

Maybe we should talk about what constitutes a good fish. Ten-kara rods are designed to catch average trout. Twelve- to 15-inchers are easy, and tenkara anglers land 20-inchers on a regular basis. Some rod models are geared toward smaller streams and fish, others for bigger ones. But this is not the kind of tackle to use for hucking big streamers to five-pound browns. It has its limits.

There’s a video on YouTube of a Japanese guy catching steelhead on a tributary of the Skeena River with a collapsible, fixed-line rod—but the rod is 24 feet long. It’s what’s known as a keiryu rod, designed for drifting bait to large fish. Fixed-line “pole fishing” for everything from herring to tuna is big in Asia, and tenkara is just one variety of it. It is by definition stream trout fishing.

But Is Tenkara Fly-Fishing?You bet it is.

There is one characteristic that distinguishes fly-fishing from every other kind of fishing with a rod: in fly-fishing, you cast the line, and the lure simply goes along for the ride. That’s exactly what

U.K. angler Paul Gaskell with a nice tenkara-caught brown. Courtesy of Tenkara USA

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