Posted on March 09 2015
The Tenkara and the Steelhead
I spoke with Bart Bonime, Fishing Director at Patagonia last spring. They had just introduced the Tenkara fly rod in a package including rod, line, leader, flies and a book on the subject co-authored by Yvonne Chouinard and Craig Matthews. Tenkara has Asian roots on small streams and consists simply of a limber pole, sans reel, that you tie a line onto the end of. I had a trout/steelhead float trip on the books for that summer on the Deschutes and thought it might be a good spot to give the Tenkara rods a shake. Bonime sent out a pair of them, one for trout, another for steelhead, and we packed them aboard the raft.
I was drawn to Tenkara by way of its touted simplicity. Tom Sawyer simple with a tech spin. Rod, line, done. Chouinard put it thus: “… simplicity leads to a richer and more satisfying way of fishing—and more importantly, living.” Considering the specialized limb fly fishing has crawled out onto over the last couple of decades, simple was a good thing.
We were an eclectic company of eight, including a hippie photographer, a county exec, an arborist and a geologist, and a cute young island woman (and her big boyfriend), as cook, and put forth an eclectic fleet that morning, including a couple of large gear barges, a nimble, mid-sized cat, a pair of IKs and a pack raft.
We could feel the heat building early in the day at the boat launch at Beavertail, but it was only a patch on temps the week before when the mercury topped 114!
We floated deep into the heart of the roadless canyon and pulled ashore late in the afternoon at a favorite old camp. The Pick Pocket Camp was so named years ago when Ken Morrish and I hiked up here in pre-dawn darkness to nail three steelies in front of a snoozing driftboat camp. It was a true desert oasis, on a cool sand bar under a grove of white alders beside a running river. And was surrounded by exquisite steelie runs. We pretty much threw out our anchor here for the better part of a week.
I set up the little 8’ 6” Tenkara with a short line and a little Hare’s Ear and leaned it in the crook of a tree on the bank in front of camp. People would grab it to fish rainbow and mountain whitefish in front of camp, and it was a gas … light as a feather—hook-play-swing-release—indeed, it doesn’t get simpler than that.
As for the bigger rod and the steelhead, it was a mission I undertook myself, and while everyone else fished conventional tackle I hung with the Tenky (as we had affectionately taken to calling the rods).
I shortened line and leader enough to be able to turn over a #6 Mack’s Canyon and hiked up to a favorite run above camp that fished fast and close into shore. It was the prefect venue for short line fishing and I spent some time there getting familiar with the new stick.
I found the upside right off.
A finely tapered flex made a smooth transition to line and fly. Mending was subtle and the feeling of connection throughout the swing was tangible. The distinction between rod and line felt seamless, which took a little getting used to.
I fish a short line whenever I can, so I was used to that. What I didn’t like, was the constant pressure on my wrist. Without a reel as counterweight, it was a continual effort to keep the rod at a bit of angle in anticipation of a strike.
I can see how fishing Tenkara in the vertical plane, though, i.e., high sticking nymphs and fishing dries, mitigates the issue, and the smaller rod was light enough not to make the effect as pronounced as it was when I was swinging his bigger brother.
I fished steelies with it exclusively the first couple of days, and I was fishing just above camp late the second day at the edge of a big suckhole, when it happened.My swing was slow as molasses and I threw I single mend to perk it up … and UNNNGH!
The rod yanked toward the water and I hauled back hard to try and catch a bend.
It was a large fish and boiled heavily in front of me!
The next few seconds were high mayhem of thunderous thrashing and mighty surging and felt about like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket!
I was a short distance from camp and let out a whoop, hoping against hope to get a camera on the scene, but the roar of the river drowned me out. And so I held on for, what, short of electrocution or orgasm, were the most viscerally intense few moments of my life.
Then, suddenly, it was off, breaking fresh, fifteen pound test monofilament!
A short ‘fight’ as we fishermen like to euphemize, but the reverberation of what I felt in those high voltage moments stayed with me for the remainder of the trip (even now, here at the desk as I write this, the memory remains cellular).
Later that night, I found myself sitting alone by the river in the dark. Everyone else was in the sack but Dave and I could hear him strumming his guitar in the kitchen. The river murmured in melodic baritone as it swept past on its way to the Columbia, then on to the ocean, I realized, up to the skies, onto the John Day Mountains, and voile, right here, yet again. I lit my pipe (which pipe is that, you ask) and sat back to reflect on the extraordinary experience earlier that day.
When we hook a fish on a line tied to the tip of rod, the fish isn’t going anywhere, unless, of course, fate intervenes. For those of us who enjoy enacting the role of classic predator, there is no flee, no chase. For ambush predators who prefer the life or death struggle all in one fell swoop, it might be ultimate sauce.
But hook a big fella on a short line and conventional tackle and it’s off like a shot. Fly reel is spinning like a top and the rod is bucking a relatively (to a Tenky) elegant staccato of impulses. When a fish runs off like this, I slip on my predator shoes and get after it.
Over the last couple of decades my fishing has been mostly multi-month, wilderness kayak treks, or (as I am wont to think of them) moveable seafood feasts, where our predator flags are flying free. I even one-upped the Tenky, once, by landing a big king without a reel or a rod, on a hand line and a bucktail. Not my favorite way to fish, but fun takes a back seat to a protein imperative on expedition. And even then, the hand-line has some give and take as line slips through gloved fingers.
In summary, without the ability to yield line and abstract the violence of a big fish—make the operative keyword here: transform that violence into our pleasure—without it, it was pure knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth cliché, leaving me battered and rattled from a mega dose of frenetic energy, and dispelling all doubt as to why the fly reel was invented.
On the other hand, the little trout rod was a delight on the river for ‘bows and whitefish. The springiness of the rod is well matched to the size of the fish. I’m heading into the mountains with it in a few weeks time to do some stream fishing, which I expect is its highest octave.
original content Rob Lyon
photo Robyn Minkler
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