I've seen mention here of folks who have been fishing tenkara style for a long time, but I'm not smart enough to sift out those posts with a search.
What are the earliest dates you can recall?
Thanks.
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I've seen mention here of folks who have been fishing tenkara style for a long time, but I'm not smart enough to sift out those posts with a search.
What are the earliest dates you can recall?
Thanks.
I'm not sure exactly what you are asking. Of course, folks have been fishing with fixed length line rods for several hundred years, both in the east and the west.
I personally started to fly fish with a fixed length line system in 2009 (which isn't that long ago in the greater scheme of things). The first U.S. reference I saw to fishing that way was a forum entry by Chris Stewart.
I received my first true tenkara rod in January or February of 2008. I had been playing around with crappie rods trying to recreate the British loop rods during the summer and fall of 2007. I first learned about tenkara sometime in the fall of 2007 and immediately switched my interest from loop rods to tenkara. As far as I recall, a google search on "tenkara" in 2007 or 2008 would yield two hits outside of Japan. One in the US posted on some forum by a guy called Steelieman who had hurt a shoulder or arm and found that he could not cast a fly rod but he could fish tenkara (still around and still doing tenkara) and one in Canada, the details of which I have forgotten but I think was in Labrador fishing for brook trout. There was also a Tenkara Rod company (possibly also in Canada) that had nothing to do with tenkara rods, just like the Loop rod company in Sweden has nothing to do with loop rods. I know that Ed Van Put, (who wrote ?Trout Fishing in the Catskills? and worked for the NY Department of Environmental Conservation) had received a tenkara rod from the Japanese Ambassador about 15 years ago and loved fishing with it. To my knowledge, he never wrote about it though.
Didn't know there was a name for it. 60 years ago we called it just plain fishing. Bamboo (cane) pole 10 - 15 feet long with a piece of level fly line tied to the end of it, 6 - 8 feet of leader and a green rubber spider for a fly. Lots of tasty bluegills went to the table using that set up. We also used a heavier outfit for bass fishing. The difference being that the bass rig only used about 6 feet of chalk line and the lure was a treble hook covered with hair from a cows tail and all of that was inserted into a lambs nipple. You would dap that lure in the lilly pads to catch bass. We called that "doodle-sockin".
Jerry
Fifty years ago, I spent countless hours in my pre-teen years using a willow branch to fish with a green sponge spider, and had a great time doing so, caught alot of fish. I still enjoy spending countless hours fly fishing with a tenkara rod, still catch my fair share of fish.
Of course, I also used to enjoy riding my bike with baseball cards in my spokes, now I enjoy riding a Harley.
Is there a subliminal connection, I don't know.
Thanks all.
What I'm looking for is a reference I thought I read on this forum, regarding folks who've been fishing tenkara or tenkara style since, if I recall, the 1950's or so, here in the USA.
Let the hunt continue...