All Fishermen Are Liars (13 page)

I once heard a dry-fly fisherman say, “You can catch ’em ugly or you can catch ’em pretty.” I agree, but I now think that catching ’em pretty has more to do with a kind of seamless elegance than with what’s tied to the end of your leader. How you decide to fly-fish on any given day is one of those rare things that needn’t concern anyone else. It’s yours alone and the only rule is that if there’s something you love, you should do as much of it as you can—the same rationale that works so well for Labrador retrievers.

So I now consider myself a generalist, but I still have a soft spot for dry flies simply because that’s how all this started. Likewise, I was with a dark-haired girl on that first memorable night in the back row at the drive-in, so brunettes will rattle my cage for the rest of my natural life. This is less than a pathological fixation, but somehow more than just a preference. There’s nothing I can do about it and nothing I
should
do.

13

TENKARA

We were in my kitchen in northern Colorado on a warm August evening. I was at the stove stirring a pot of elk spaghetti sauce; Susan McCann, the journalist and editor I’ve lived with for the last twenty years, was constructing an enormous salad; and Ed Engle, the fishing writer and my oldest continuous friend, was slicing French bread. Daniel Galhardo, owner and founder of Tenkara USA, had offered to help several times, but it was a small, crowded kitchen with cats
underfoot and limited counter space, and there was nothing left to do, so he’d settled for volunteering to wash the dishes.

For the last few days, Ed and Daniel had been staying at the house, and the three of us had been tenkara fishing in some nearby trout streams. The plan for the next day was to four-wheel up to 9,000 feet to a brook trout creek Ed and I like, and to that end I’d drive to a friend’s house after dinner to borrow his Jeep Wrangler. In the thirty-some years that Ed and I have been fishing this stream, the road has deteriorated to the point that my four-wheel-drive pickup with its long wheelbase will no longer make it without bottoming out.

Tenkara is a traditional Japanese method of fixed-line fly fishing that uses only a long, light rod with a length of line attached and a single fly. No guides, no extra line, no reel. It’s been billed accurately as the soul of simplicity: the fly-fishing equivalent of haiku. This method—or something very much like it—has been practiced in the mountain streams of Japan for at least several hundred years and may date back as far as the eighth or ninth century.

The original rods were unsplit bamboo and the lines were braided horsehair. They were similar to the rods described in
The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle
in 1496 and by any number of other cultures around the world that used artificial flies, although the advantage Japan had over Europe was that they could use bamboo instead of hardwood, so from the beginning the rods were lighter and more delicate. It’s conceivable that there was some cross-pollination between cultures that would explain the similarity in tackle, but it seems more likely that when first confronted with the question of how to deliver a feathered hook to a fish using available technology, the universal answer has always been: Get a long stick and a string.

Tenkara wouldn’t have been considered a sport at first. It’s said to have been developed by people who simply wanted fish to eat or sell, so there was no need for the embellishments you find in things that are done more for fun than results. The rod itself could be found
growing wild, and collected rather than bought. There was no need for more than a rod’s length of line because the mountain streams these anglers fished, and the trout and char they caught, were both fairly small. A tenkara rod was a tool: as utilitarian as a hoe or a shovel and no more complicated than it had to be. Even the apparently ornamental wraps may have been originally intended to camouflage the outline of the rod rather than to look pretty.

The modern incarnation of tenkara
is
considered a sport, but although it’s gone somewhat high-tech, it hasn’t lost its homespun simplicity. The rods are now telescoping graphite, usually between eleven and fourteen feet long, inspired by some of the traditional bamboo versions where smaller sections were stored inside larger ones to make the rods more portable. The lines are either braided fluorocarbon—like a long furled leader—or sometimes just level lengths of fluorocarbon that have a smaller diameter and are said to cast better in the wind. But high-tech or not, a Japanese angler from three hundred years ago would recognize the tackle.

Daniel said he learned to fly-fish with a conventional fly rod and reel in his native Brazil as a teenager. Later, while living in San Francisco, he got interested in Japanese styles of fly fishing and first learned about tenkara from an old pamphlet published by the English Board of Tourism in 1939. When he traveled to Japan with his wife, Margaret Kuwata, in 2008, he saw tenkara firsthand and was smitten by its elegant simplicity. He doesn’t describe this as a conversion experience, but he now fishes exclusively with tenkara tackle, although he’s held onto his old rod and reel for sentimental reasons.

Daniel founded Tenkara USA in 2009, marketing the few things a tenkara fisherman needs: rod, line, a handful of flies and not much else. (Tenkara is a traditional Japanese method, but oddly—though maybe not surprisingly—the rods are made in China.) It was also in that year that Daniel met the renowned tenkara fisherman Dr. Hisao Ishigaki when the Doctor spoke at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center in
New York. Daniel and Ishigaki hit it off as student and teacher and now jokingly refer to each other as “
tenkara no otto-san
” and “
tenkara no musuko
” or “tenkara father” and “tenkara son.”

Ishigaki is sometimes referred to as a “tenkara master,” but that’s an unofficial title. In fact, he makes no special claims for himself or for tenkara beyond the method’s austere efficiency. Some Americans can’t help but imbue the sport with oriental ideology, but when Daniel asked him if there was a Zen aspect to tenkara, Ishigaki laughed and said, “No Zen, just a nice way to catch fish”—which of course is exactly what a Zen master would say.

Daniel himself is young, lean, fit, and seems shy at first, but then turns out to be only soft-spoken. He comes off as a kind of low-key evangelist and his enthusiasm can be quietly infectious, but he’s not unaware of the difficulties of introducing something small, quiet and simple to a country that likes things big, loud and complicated. He also understands the dangers inherent in turning something you love into a business, but doesn’t seem worried about it. So far, he hasn’t launched the big media blitz, which I suspect is equal parts economics and temperament, but he has the obligatory website and blog, he’s run a few ads, has done a few interviews and sometimes turns up at fly-fishing trade shows.

Tenkara isn’t widely known in America, but word-of-mouth is spreading and in certain circles it has a kind of underground buzz. Over the last year or so, I’ve run into a number of fly fishers who have heard of tenkara and a smaller handful who’ve tried it. Attitudes range from shrugging indifference through various levels of curiosity to a newfound dedication to simplicity, though this isn’t widespread enough to have flooded the market with used rods and reels. Most said they learned about it on the Internet, and when I searched “tenkara” recently out of curiosity, I got just short of forty thousand results.

There’s also been some resistance. A famous fisherman said tenkara was a fad that would blow itself out in a few seasons—a hard
case to make about something that’s been established practice for centuries. Others have flatly declared that it’s not really fly fishing without specifying exactly why.

Converts, on the other hand, brag about the ease of the method and the number of fish they catch. Another well-known fisherman recently said, “I can teach your granddaughter to fish with a tenkara in two minutes and she’ll catch more than you.”

A collapsed tenkara rod is only about twenty inches long—a stubby graphite shaft with a cork grip that resembles the butt section of a multipiece graphite rod with the reel seat sawn off. When you first extend one, it keeps coming and coming until it begins to feel unwieldy. The line is attached by girth-looping the butt end to a short piece of knotted cord called a “lillian” that sticks straight out of the end of the tip section. The leader is attached to the line with a loop-to-loop connection. You can use whatever length leader you want, but it’s best to start with a tippet that doesn’t extend much more than a foot or two past the butt of the rod. It’s all pretty self-evident, but it doesn’t hurt to read the instructions.

The cast is a familiar fly cast, but with a shorter, softer stroke and a high, reaching stop designed to keep the line and most of the leader off the water. It’s easy to overpower the rod, and your inbred tendency to shoot an extra foot or two, even on a short forward cast, is stymied by the fixed line. At the end of every cast, your left hand reflexively reaches for the loose line off the reel that isn’t there. This may get annoying enough that you’ll put your line hand in your pocket to make it stop.

The first time I fished a tenkara rod was in March, during a midge hatch on a small local tailwater. The long, whippy rod and fixed line seemed awkward at first, but I got used to them quickly. The usual repertoire of overhead, sidearm, tuck and pile casts all worked, as well as that flipping aerial roll cast small-stream fishers use and that no one I know has a name for. This was actually the same way I fish
pocket water with the usual seven-foot nine-inch or eight-foot rod: making short casts and high-stick drifts with little more than a rod’s length of line. The only difference was that with a thirteen-foot rod, a short cast was noticeably longer and I could hold more line off the water for a better, longer drift.

Playing and landing small fish was the kind of thing you’d work out on your own even if you hadn’t been told how to do it. You fight the fish against the bend of the rod, and when it’s played out, you lift the rod until you can reach the line, hold the line against the rod with one hand and run the other hand down to your trout. Some tenkara fishermen carry a small, round landing net with an offset handle called a
tamo.
Nine times out of ten, it’s not necessary, but when it
is
necessary, you’re real glad to have it.

It’s been said that anyone can learn to fish adequately with a tenkara rod in a few hours, and that may not be an exaggeration. These things are recognizable fly rods, and the more you know about fly fishing in general and tenkara specifically, the more you can get out of them, but they still bear a vague family resemblance to a cane pole and string and are therefore something a seven-year-old could master instinctively. In fact, Daniel said he sells a fair number of rods to hikers and backpackers who aren’t exactly dedicated fly fishermen but who like the idea of a complete fishing outfit that packs down small and only weighs a few ounces.

He’s also careful to point out that tenkara rods are intended specifically for small water and fish not much more than a foot long, so I wasn’t sure that tailwater would be entirely tenkara-friendly. It was a little too wide to be called a small stream and although the average trout is around ten or twelve inches long, you could easily hook a bigger fish. But as it turned out, the water was still low in March, the wading was easy, and with a little more than twenty-six feet of rod and line, there weren’t many places I couldn’t reach. I also didn’t hook a trout longer than ten inches on that first day.

There was another unforeseen advantage. This was a cold, humid day at an elevation of around 8,000 feet, and as we strung up our rods at the car, my friend Vince said, “I hope my line doesn’t freeze in the guides.” I held up the long rod with no guides and said, “No worries here.”

It was only a week or so later on the same river that I did hook a fish I couldn’t land. It was a rainbow I’ll guess at around seventeen inches and when it made a strong run, I instinctively pointed the rod at him to give him line, remembering too late that I didn’t have any more line to give. (Apparently there’s no tenkara equivalent to the screaming reel.) Of course, with the rod pointed straight at the fish, he came up tight, neatly snapped off the fly, and kept going. I’ve lost countless fish over the years and none of them were the end of the world, although they all felt like it at the time. This isn’t the old cliché about the big one getting away; it’s just that the one that does get away is suddenly the one you really wanted.

Sometime later Ed explained that you should keep your rod up even on a heavy fish, and that this wasn’t just a case of horse ’em and hope for the best. Between the flex of the long, light rod, a little stretch in the braided line, and the cushion of your own wrist and elbow, you can actually lay into a bigger trout much harder than you think. Also, a fish can only go in the direction he’s pointed, and the reach of the long rod lets you deflect a run and steer the fish into slack water. It does take practice but finally boils down to a little knowledge of fish behavior, a feel for the capabilities of the tackle and the accurate snap judgment. You can still hook a fish you can’t land, but once you know how to use the rod, that fish gets considerably larger.

Daniel suggests using only light leaders because it
is
possible to break these long, delicate rods (he markets replacement sections), but of course not everyone follows his advice. He said he’s heard from customers who claim to have landed unusually large fish on
tenkara rods: twenty-inch trout, small steelhead, some bonefish and a largemouth bass weighing eight pounds. He seemed to have mixed feelings about that, but when his wife landed her own twenty-inch rainbow on a tenkara rod, he was eager to show me the photos.

As it turned out, Ed and I had stumbled on tenkara independently, which was no surprise to me. We’ve known each other for something like thirty-five years and share, among other things, a long-running interest in traditional Japanese art, poetry and philosophy that dates back to our counterculture days in the 1970s. (This year we coincidentally sent each other the same Christmas card featuring a winter scene by Japanese woodblock artist Kawase Hasui.) It was only natural that with something like this in the air, we’d have both caught the same scent. It was also just like Ed to have worked out some things that I’d missed.