I recently got some eyeless tenkara hooks from Tenkara Bum and have been having a lot of fun trying out different patterns. But I was curious…are the claims about eyeless hooks having more action in the water true? So, I decided to do a (very unscientific) test and see. I tied two flies with identical…
I got some eyeless tenkara hooks today from Tenkara Bum: the Owner Yamame and Gamakatsu Amago. They’re both great hooks with interesting bends and finishes that will surely make for some fun experimentation. In Japan, tiers would use a silk cord to form a loop “eye”. I didn’t have any silk cord so I’m…
In terms of gear, waders are just about as sexy to me as socks. I’d much rather fawn over new rods, nets, or a really nice wooden fly box. But, waders are a necessary fishing tool. Many years ago, I became a breathable wader convert but I had one complaint–a lack of durability. Even after…
Remember my post about tenkara’s diversity in simplicity? This video is a perfect example of that. In it, you will see a range of different tenkara casting techniques including the standard 10 o’clock / 12 o’clock overhand cast, the backhand (cross-chest) cast, sidearm cast, and the bow-and-arrow cast–but not just any bow-and-arrow cast.
I’ve been asked by several people to make a video showing the basic steps on how to tie a sakasa kebari so here it is. I chose a very simple pattern for the demo but you could easily substitute a lot of different materials to create a wide variety of patterns.
Here’s another quick video clip from the Denver Fly Fishing Show of Daniel Galhardo breaking down the basic tenkara casting stroke. Sorry for the bad audio. It’s hard to get good sound at a trade show without a lapel mic. Plus, the lighting at the show was horrible. While the quality might not be great,…
This weekend, I sat in in a cabin next to a wood burning stove with the Arkansas River not 20 yards away from me. I brought my Yamame and Ito hoping to get some fishing in but it was not meant to be. The winds howled, rattling the wood stove chimney and everything else in…
[/caption] I came home from work today to find a nice package from Japan in the mailbox waiting for me. Red fluorocarbon! I’ve been talking to a company there about getting some bulk hi-vis level line and they were gracious enough to send me some sample line. Here’s what it looks like and my initial…
I’ve never seen any discussion of tenkara where the word “simplicity” didn’t come up at least a few times. It’s true that simplicity is an easily identifiable attribute of tenkara but this seems to put gear addicts like me in an interesting dilema. Is our love of gear antithetical to the intrinsic nature of tenkara?…
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the materials I use to tie my tenkara flies and realized that I’ve been doing a bad job of posting them. So, from now on, I am going to try to post the complete recipe for all the flies I post in the future. Here’s the…
[/caption] One of the questions people seem to struggle with most is which tenkara rod to choose. After all, there are a variety of different lengths and actions. And since (on paper at least) some of them seem very similar, making the decision can be even more confusing. I happen to own the entire Tenkara…
I got a lot of footage of the Tenkara USA demo at this year’s fly fishing show and thought I would break it up into shorter, more digestible videos on specific topics rather than post it in its entirety. In this video, Daniel shows us how to land a fish with tenkara–with a special focus on using…
After a recent discussion with Karel from Tenkara on the Fly, I finally decided to sit down and do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: put together a tenkara kit to leave in my car for when those unexpected fishing opportunities present themselves. The conversation went something like this… We were…
[/caption] Even though I already posted about my general experience at this year’s Denver Fly Fishing Show, I left a lot of loose ends. So, over the course of the next couple weeks, I will probably have a few posts here and there telling you about some of the gems I found there. One such gem…