Early Tenkara ?

[GregM]

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.

[pszy22]

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.

[CM_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.

[fishbum]

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.

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

[pszy22]

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.

[GregM]

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...