My son and I drove through WBSF yesterday morning on the way to drop him off at Boy Scout camp. Nick asked, “Do you think there are any trout in there Dad?”. I replied, “I don’t know but it might be fun trying sometime.”

On the way home after the drop off, my mind turned to Willard Brook. It seemed to be a perfect spot for tenkara fishing for Brook trout. I could not resist the temptation to pull over and try it out. No need for waders, net and all of the other accouterments that normally accompany me on larger rivers. I grabbed my tenkara rod and line, a spool of tippet and a small box of my favorite flies (that included a small nipper for cutting tippet). That was it – me, a simple rod, and a beautiful cascading stream.

I found a likely spot, a deep pool with crystal clear icy water. I always sit and watch pools like this for a few minutes before casting in. Many times, a Brookie will give away their hiding spot or come up for a quick bite. I didn’t see anything after a few minutes so I cast in to the cascade and let the current propel my simple tenkara fly. It was a bright sunny day and there were spots of bright sunlight and dark shadows on the stream. I used my favorite red body, grizzly hackle fly. I fished that pool – about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle in size and depth (the original Volkswagon Beetle) – making sure to cover every possible trout lair. No luck.

I moved down stream a short distance to pool #2. This pool was significantly smaller but deeper and was flanked by a large boulder that diverted the water rushing in to it.

I sat quietly on a large boulder and peered in to the clear water. I spotted a long slender shadow on a rock deep in the pool. It still amazes me how a trained eye can locate these tell-tale signs of trout! I focused on the shadow and, sure enough, it moved slightly to the left just as I spotted the Brookie hovering about a foot above it. This was a nice small stream Brook Trout! I watched the trout as he rushed to the surface, grabbed what looked to be a small tan caddis, and headed for the depths of his pool. He was feeding and I knew where he hid – a perfect opportunity! As I quickly found and tied on a small (size 18) tan Elk Hair Caddis (one of my go-to dry fly patterns) he came up for another morsel. This time I got a better look at his colorful spots and white edged fins. This was an exceptional fish.

I waited for 60 seconds after he fed and then gently “cast” my EHC about 6′ upstream of his lair. I like to use the “slingshot” cast on short, precision casts like this. In this case, it was perfect and the fly landed gently on the water in a cluster of foam. I raised the tip of my rod so only the fly and 6″ of tippet were in the water. As the caddis imitation drifted over Brookie’s hold, the fish moved forward and gave a look up, but no take. At least I got his attention. I let the fly drift well downstream – staying alert in case another fish hit. After retrieving my fly, I slingshot cast it to the exact spot. This time it was on the outer edge of a little foam raft and clearly visible. I waited patiently as the fly swirled and slowly made its way down stream. This time Brookie saw the fly and darted to the surface – a good 5′ or so – and grabbed the fly with perfect precision.

As Brookie darted to the bottom with my EHC in its mouth, he realized something wasn’t quite right and turned to head downstream. A quick redirection with my rod and I began the retrieve. Tenkara rods have no reel so the retrieve basically consists of gently pulling the fish towards you until it is close enough to land. In small streams and small trout a net isn’t necessary. I landed the fish and admired his colors and healthy appearance. I always keep my camera at the ready so I wasted no time snapping a few photos.

I like to get the fish back in to the water as quickly as possible so sometimes the photos are not quite focused. That happened in this case. I wanted a shot of the fish next to my rod handle so I could measure it later. The photo was slightly out of focus but suitable for its intended purpose. A little work in Photoshop turned the out of focus photo into a pseudo “art shot”.

Satisfied, I packed up and headed up the bank to head home. The entire experience lasted all of 30 minutes from the time I parked!

The section “Tenkara in the Land of Little Rivers” was shot in the Catskills. One of the attendees, Christopher Stuart has many appearances in the video and is the gentleman who introduced me to tenkara when he posted a comment about my horse hair fly lines on this blog! My son and I also have a short appearance (but I would like this video anyway!). The video is remarkably affordable at $5 too. Daniel (founder of Tenkara USA) has done a wonderful job educating and promoting tenkara to American anglers. There is a great section on tenkara techniques and equipment on the DVD too. Check it out!

I now take a tenkara rod on all my backpacking trips or to keep one in my car for a quick stop at a local stream.

Since making these items is just a hobby for me, I intend for Eclectic Angler to be a resource as much as a store. I’ll show people how to make a horsehair line, sell them the hair, or sell them the completed line. My goal is to develop a community around making and using your own fly fishing equipment. The site is no where near complete but I wanted to get the framework and basic design started so I can get feedback and start automating orders.

I’m handling all of the design, development and e-commerce myself using a combination of Open Source, RapidWeaver (all I can say about it is “wow”), GoDaddy, and PayPal. Putting the site together is almost as much fun as building the items themselves! This process has also given me a great perspective on what a new small business must go through to launch a web presence. There are lots of decisions and options and pricing alternatives. I can see why new business people are perplexed!

So, without further adieu, I give you The Eclectic Angler.

On Saturday morning, Nick and I met up with our friends Aaron and Ethan to head north to White Mountains of New Hampshire. On the way up, it was obvious that the rivers were swollen from all of the rain we had through July. I have never seen them this high, this late in the summer. We stopped at our favorite pancake house for breakfast before hitting the trail.

It was a short drive to the Lincoln Woods parking area and trailhead from there. We had a lot of camping and fishing equipment to pack. Nick and I were both bringing conventional fly fishing gear and our tenkara rods. Several of the small tributary streams are perfect places for the tenkara style of fishing and I was looking froward to that. After assembling our gear and doing last minute checks, we hiked the 3 miles up to our campsite.

The trip up went really fast! We scouted the camping area and found a site with a picnic table! A luxury in the woods.

We set up camp and then suited up for a hike up-river to find some wily trout. This section of the Pemigewasset is mostly Brook Trout. The river was flowing fast with extremely high water. I caught 1 smallish 9″ brookie on a rod with one of those reel things attached (a little tenkara joke). It took a cast across the raging current to get to where the fish was in the calmer water on the other side. It was a tough day of fishing, with that being the only trout caught. My son caught something about 2″ long that we did not get a close look at. I suspect it was a fingerling Brookie.

I was looking forward to Sunday when were planning to fish one of the tributaries that I knew was ideal for tenkara. Unfortunately, my son had tucked his Iwana into his wading belt and lost it. We looked everywhere so he must have lost it in the stream when we aborted a crossing – the water was too deep and swift.

(sorry, the lens was a bit steamed up!)

Here’s Aaron in his natural habitat:

After a few hours of fishing and exploring the river and a tributary, it was time to head back to camp and make dinner. (note to self; ALWAYS bring water where ever I go!)

Aaron and Ethan made some fantastic pasta and tomato sauce. I made a peach/berry cobbler in a boiling bag! It was pretty good.

We lounged around camp, talked and prepared for the next day’s fishing. The weather held out and it was a nice, cool and dry evening – perfect sleeping weather. After hanging our food in a bear bag, we hit the sack.

The plan was to walk back to the van (3 miles) and leave the packs there. Then, hike up the other side of the Pemi since we could not cross. At 3 miles, the Franconia Brook runs in to the Pemi via a series of plunge pools carved into the granite. This is perfect tenkara water.

The next day, we packed quickly and headed down. The hike went quickly. We packed lightly – no waders or boots – for the 3 miles up to Franconia Brook. I only brought my tenkara rod.

At about 1 mile in, I stopped at a small stream to try my fly at a brookie I saw luring. No luck, so we headed up-stream. Somewhere along the way, I broke the tip on my Yamame – about 1/2″ below the metal tip. I had only brought my Yamame so I needed to figure out a fix while we continued the hike up.

When we got to the trailhead to the tributary, we stopped for lunch and I pondered my rod tip. Being a rod builder, I analyzed the damage and had an idea. I grabbed the stub of graphite sticking out of the metal tip with my hemostats and pulled it out. I then reinserted the rod tip in to the metal tip. The fit was a bit loose but workable. Now I just needed some way to keep it on. Some hikers walked by so I asked if they had a bandaid for my fly rod. They did! Here is the result, you can see the short broken tip stub to the right of the repair. The bandaid seemed to do the trick. 

We continued the short hike up to the plunge pools to do some fishing.

Aaron and I had success catching the small brookies living in a deep pool. There were some larger fish deep down – I’m guessing 20′ or so – but we couldn’t get anything down that deep. The brookies were fun and really beautiful. Ethan caught a nicely colored brookie too. Nick was not having good luck. He had a fish strike his fly at least 20 times – different flies and 3 different rods too – take the fly below the surface, and then not hook up. It wasn’t the fly or hook, it wasn’t the technique, it was the fish. It was one of those days.

Ethan had a little boo-boo on the rocks and used the little piece of left-over bandaid to stop the bleeding.

At the end of the day, I caught 6 brookies in the big yellow-green pool. Aaron got a good photo of me, the fish and my Yamame. I’ll add it once he sends it to me. EDIT: and here it is:

It was a great weekend of backpacking, fly fishing and friendship!

This morning I got an email from CM_Stewart (the fellow who introduced me to tenkara and told me about Dr. Ishigaki’s presentation). Here is what CM_Stewart had to say:

I thought about sending this when I first saw your description of Dr. Ishigaki’s flies, but decided it wasn’t important.

I still think it’s not important, but decided you might want to know. Your instructions for tying one of  Dr. Ishigaki’s flies will produce a fly just as good as his, but that’s not the way he ties them. He starts the thread just behind the eye, wraps back to the point where he will attach the hackle and then back to the eye. He ties in the hackle by the stem, concave side up, without stripping one side, with the stem pointing toward the eye, reaching to just behind the eye. He wraps back and forth enough to securely attach the hackle and build up the head to his desired thickness. He pulls the hackle straight up and then takes a few thread wraps behind it. He wraps the hackle with five full wraps and traps it behind the hackle (toward the bend). He wraps thread over the base of the hackle enough to give the hackle a slight forward slant. He then wraps the thread back and forth between the bend and the hackle enough to build up the body to his desired thickness (neatness does not count here, it detracts from the segmented look of the body and also slows you down – he ties very quickly). He finishes with a couple half hitches and a spot of cement AT THE BEND. He says to tie off at the bend to make sure you don’t get any cement on the hackle (remember, he ties very, very quickly).

Your way is just as good, and even if you did see him tie and knew that your description is different, it still falls within the “poetic license” of how to tie a fly. Still, I thought that if you didn’t know how he tied them himseslf, you might want to know.

Actually, now that I think about it, there may be a meaningful difference in the two methods. You specify two or three turns of a hackle with one side stripped. He specifies five turns of an unstripped hackle. Yours is much more sparse, and his much bushier (assuming you both use the same hackle). Since he uses rooster hackle, the bushier tie makes a more effective “sea anchor” effect, creating more resistance in the water and allowing you to fish a slightly tighter line. I don’t know if it is enough to be significant.

So there we have it! CM_Stewart was there and saw how the fly was tied. I scrutinized the flies Dr. Ishigaki gave me, exchanged several letters with him, and did a little research on some Japanese Web sites on tying this fly to come up with my recipe. I am going to give this technique a try myself!

(email posted with CM_Stewart’s permission, thanks!)

My youngest son and nephew are both 12 so I let them take my Yamame rod. My oldest son has his own tenkara rod, an 11′ Iwana. He left his furled line at home in MA so I let him try one of the level fluoro lines that my new tenkara friend Chris sent me. They are bright pink and easy to see. He headed down the shore for some privacy.

With the 2 twelve year olds ready to go, I had to teach them to cast in to a slight head wind. Both boys were casting like champs in a few tries. They were both catching perch and bluegills in a matter of minutes. Perch on a light tenkara rod are particularly fun!

When the boys went off to swim, I took rod in hand and chased after some bass I saw a little further offshore. The water was warm so I wet waded past my knees and was able to reach the structure where the fish were hiding. I cast a size 12 black fly – the kind I wrote about a few weeks ago – and hooked a small striped bass within a few minutes. I’ve only fished for stripers on the ocean so this was a treat.

Materials

Hook: Tiemco 100 – sizes 16, 14, 12, 10

Thread: any large nylon or polyester thread will do. Dr. Ishigaki uses cheap nylon thread from a discount store. I have been using Danville 3/0 fly tying thread.

Hackle: India Hen, Partridge, or Pheasant soft hackle

Tying

Notice that I did not specify colors for the thread and hackle. That’s because you can use most any color you have available. I like to tie these in several sizes (16, 14, 12) and colors for the small brookies that inhabit my local streams. I usually tie these colors:

• all black
• black body and brown hackle
• black body and grizzly hackle
• red body and grizzly hackle
• cream body and ginger hackle
• cream body and brown hackle
• ginger body and grizzly hackle
• olive body and grizzly hackle

That’s basically a spool of black, red, cream, and olive thread and black grizzly, brown and ginger hackle.

Smash down the hook barb and clamp in your vise. Tie the thread in right behind the eye and wrap in tight turns back to the point opposite to where the barb point was squashed down. Build up a slightly tapered body to a point about 1/2 the length of the hook shank – check these photos for the correct proportions.

1. Prepare your hackle by stripping off the barbs on one side of the quill. This allows you to make wraps with the barbs standing up nicely.
2. Brush the remaining barbs through your fingers to stand them up and separate them.
3. Tie in the tip end of the hackle at the 1/2 way point with the concave side of the hackle facing forward.
4. Position the thread forward a few turns.
5. Wrap the hackle forward 2 to 3 turns making sure that the concave side stays facing forward and the barbs stand up and are not squashed down by neighboring wraps.
6. Tie down the hackle with 2 turns of thread and trim the excess off.
7. Wrap the thread forward to the hook eye and form a small thread head.
8. Whip finish or double half hitch the thread and trim.

That’s all there is to it. If you are in a hurry, tie some all black, red body with grizzly, and cream body with ginger hackle. I’ve caught most of my fish on these few colors.

The rod Dr. Ishigaki is holding is one of mine with a birch bark grip and olive wood accents and reel seat. The group shot is Nick, Dr. Ishigaki and me!

In the past, I’ve tried to dab flies here with a conventional 7 1/2′ bamboo rod with limited success. The rod was too short to reach mid stream from the bank (there is really no reason to wade this little stream and scare the fish) and not good at casting a short length of line. The 12′ Yamame was perfect. Intuitively, you would think a long rod in such close surroundings would not work so well, but that was not the case. It was easy to push my way through the stream-side foliage and stick the rod tip out over mid stream. In a few places, I actually collapsed the rod before “going in” and then extending it out over the water. From this bank position I could easily cast the furled tenkara line using a side cast up and down stream. In some places, I could cast across the stream too. This is stealth fishing at its finest. The trout were not at all spooked like they would be by someone splashing around in their backyard.

On my 5th cast I caught a nice Rainbow Trout on a red-bodied, grizzly hackled fly. I cast the fly upstream from where I thought he was hiding, let it drift in to his lie, and pulsed it across stream. It proved to be irresistible! The first thought that went through my mind was “cool, that was fun”, the second thought was “eeks, how do I land this guy?”. Not surprisingly, landing was very similar to landing a fish with a loop rod. In fact, casting is also very similar. I hadn’t tried a loop rod on Macedonia Brook simply because the opportunity never came up. One big difference though is the lightness and suppleness of the graphite tenkara rod. It made for a very fun, fear-free (“omg, is my rod going to break?”) experience. Being able to collapse and extend the telescoping rod is an interesting advantage too.

Here is the Rainbow:

(click for larger photo)

Even he is trying to check out that tenkara rod – I am sure he has never seen one before! This photo also shows the rod – it is a really attractive olive-gold color, supple and fun. Here is where I caught him:

(click for larger photo)

He was hiding under that big boulder on the left. A little waterfall can be seen just to the right of the photo. I saw him dart out and grab something just before it went over the falls, so I knew where he was hiding. The water is so clear that even the slightest movement spooks these fish. 

Disclaimer on the following photo – I practice catch & release and take great care not to injure or stress a caught fish. I usually do not photo fish except for special cases – like the first caught on a tenkara rod. I do not like “flopping fish” photos where the fish is flopping around on the ground. After taking the photo above, this fish slid gently out of my hand (he was only 2″ above the gravel) and laid quietly next to my rod. He did not flop around. My photographer instinct pushed the shutter release and I carefully picked him up and placed him in the water 2′ away. He instantly revived and scooted off.

(click for larger photo)

I caught one more slightly larger Rainbow a little later. I really didn’t want to leave, but dad duties called!

As you can see, this is the same fly in different colors. It is an extremely simple but effective fly when fished tenkara. It only requires a hook, thread and rooster hackle to tie! Dr. Ishigaki always fishes barbless hooks (as do I). It is fished in all four tenkara techniques: on the surface, mid depth, deep, and “streamer like”. This last is a presentation where the fly is animated by twitching the rod. 

I’ll be tying some of these and posting a simple step-by-step, so stay tuned.