I am a fan of tenkara fishing, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.
I think tenkara is less a “side attraction” and more a legitimate training aid that helps my regular fly fishing by leaps and bounds.
For those of you who are not familiar, tenkara is an ancient Japanese fishing technique that involves a long telescoping rod, a fixed line (no reel), leader and simple fly.
It’s a minimalist’s dream, and it made a splash in the United States starting about 18 years ago when my friend Daniel Galhardo founded the company Tenkara USA and started selling tenkara rods to curious anglers.
Some called it a fad at the time, but tenkara has maintained at least a solid cult following. And I think that’s with good reason.
Fun and easy
Tenkara is undeniably fun, and it’s pretty easy. At least it’s easy to make a cast that gets you in the game.
My favorite newbie goes fly fishing story ever involved tenkara. I was on an expedition in the South American country of Guyana, searching for tarpon along the coast and in the estuaries where the jungle met the Caribbean Sea. We never found the big silver kings, but we also chanced upon a massive concentration of baby tarpon. I anticipated this possibility, so I brought along a tenkara rod and a Clouser minnow fly. Sure enough, all it took was a flip of the rod and a few twitches of the fly where we’d seen a fish gulp or boil, and it was game-on. Tarpon are famous jumpers, so not having a reel with a line and backing wasn’t much of a concern; it was more like playing with a yo-yo as the fish bounced straight up and down once hooked.
One of our guides who had never held a fly rod in his life thought that looked pretty interesting and wanted to give it a try. So, I handed him the rod, and after a cast or two he hooked and landed a 10-pound tarpon.
I’m pretty sure he was the first person in the world to have their first ever fly-caught fish be a tarpon… on a tenkara rod.
Solid fly fishing lessons from tenkara
When you’re not worried about the distance you cast (your range is capped with tenkara), you focus on things that actually matter more—like accuracy. And when you’re trout fishing with a tenkara rod, because your range is limited, you learn to sneak up on fish with your feet.
When my son was learning to fly fish (around the age of 10), I put a tenkara rod in his hand, and it literally shaped the way he fishes to this day. Instead of wrapping the line all around himself, and me, and the dog, and the bushes, and other things, he became a little stealth master, sneaking up on the fish like a cat along the bank.
He thought about where the sun was positioned in the sky and where his shadows fell on the water.
He cared how the fly “behaved” once he set it on the water… sometimes a skitter earned the bite, and others, it had to drift at the mercy of the current.
He also started to think of things like “how am I going to land this fish if I hook it?” before he wound up to make a cast. And when he did hook a fish, he learned to land it and release it quickly.
Tenkara may or may not be your flavor, but I firmly believe that anglers of any experience level can hone the skills that really matter when it comes to dry-fly fishing by playing around with tenkara, at least every now and then.