A few years back I received a strange birthday present from a friend. It was some kind of fishing rod that collapsed. I took the cap off the butt and the sections started sliding out. I pushed them back in, screwed the cap back on, and stuck it in the fish closet.
Where it remained for several months, until said buddy asked, “Did you try out that Tenkara rod?”
“Why, yes,” sez I.
I hesitated. Asking the next question would reveal my ignorance. On the other hand, so what?
“What the heck is it?”
The rod in question was a 10.5-foot Temple Fork Tenkara rod. Under my pal’s tutelage, I extended it and he showed me how to tie a line to it.
“OK,” he said after I took a few tentative casts on the grass. “Let’s go fishing.”
Tenkara refers to a collapsible, telescoping, lightweight rod that has a line attached to it and no reel. The rods are similar in feel to fly rods, but there is no reel. Did I mention there is no reel?
A line is attached to the tip via a short piece of cord called a lillian. I don’t know why they picked on Lillian.
The lillian is attached to the rod tip. The line is attached to the lillian. Tippet material is added to the line. Put on a fly and you’re ready to fish.
I asked the obvious question.
“What happens when the fish runs?”
Answer: It either stops or breaks off.
There are all sorts of fixed-line telescoping rods around, and many different names for them, many in Japanese. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances. I just call it Tenkara and leave it at that.
I always groan when someone says some computer thing is “intuitive.”
But Tenkara is intuitive. If you’re standing in a stream with a long stick with a string attached to it with a fly at the end, what else are you going to do except make a cast?
The Japanese have been fishing this way for centuries. It’s a recent development in the U.S. A small but increasing number of fly-rodders are playing around with it.
Some, like my buddy, have gone almost completely over, even to the extent of selling most of his Western fly rods.
I continue to view it as an adjunct to a fly rod … but there are occasions when I barge into the woods in search of brook trout armed only with a Tenkara rod.
The advantages are many. The rods collapse to something that’s usually a foot or two long, tops. Yet they extend to anywhere between 8 and 13 feet.
For those of us accustomed to fishing little blue lines with an abbreviated fly rod (under 7 feet long) trying it with a 9- or 10-footer seems nuts.
But there is often far more room in those streams than you might think. And having the extra length means hanging back farther from the stream. Which means the spooky trout can’t see you.
A well-planned cast allows the angler to keep the line, and even most of the tippet, off the water. So when fishing dries, you can get a great drift.
When it’s time to move on, collapse the rod, secure the line on a spool or line winders attached to the rod, and make your way through the woods to the next spot. This is a lot easier than scrambling around with a rigged fly rod.
Tenkara is not just for little brookies, either. I bought an inexpensive Chinese rod, 13 feet long, and tied two Wooly Buggers on. Then I hit the Housatonic River.
On the second cast I hooked two smallmouth bass. Neither was especially big but together they were a handful. After a lengthy fuss I got them both in the net. (Then I lost the net but that’s a different story.)
In the summer I fish for largemouth in a lake. Hooking a 4-pound bass on a fixed line rod is a lot of fun.
For river fishing, I found that using a Tenkara rod made me a better overall angler. I had been getting lazy about where I was in the river, preferring to compensate for a poor position with a longer cast or a tricky mend.
With Tenkara I was plotting my moves ahead of time, much as a golfer sizes up the next two or three shots.
There are disadvantages compared to Western fly gear. If you have a 12-foot rod with a 12-foot line and 4 feet of tippet, getting your fish into the net can be difficult, unless you have really long arms and a net with a 6-foot handle. Which I don’t.
If it’s super-windy Tenkara’s probably not the best choice.
And despite my twin Wooly Bugger experiment, these rods are, generally speaking, not built for slinging big heavy weighted flies around. (Although I have one 18-footer, designed for carp fishing, that can handle a saltwater streamer easily.)
Note: People often compare Tenkara rods to cane poles. There are some similarities, but Tenkara rods are much more sensitive and infinitely more portable.
Mostly I like Tenkara because it’s fun. I’ve been fly-fishing since the age of 12, roughly, and I am 58 now. I make that 46 years.
And I’ve had lots more fun in the last six, largely because I have added Tenkara rods to my lineup.
I have a few recommendations if you’re curious.
Chris Stewart runs the Tenkara Bum website and shop. He’s forgotten more about this than I will ever know.
Teton Tenkara is a website from Tom Davis, who has also forgotten more …
There are several stateside Tenkara companies that offer rods, lines and accessories. I have done business with Tenkara USA and Dragontail Tenkara and been very pleased.
I also recommend Morgan Lyle’s book “Tenkara Today,” which cuts through the more esoteric aspects of Tenkara and gets right down to the nitty.
The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference football championship games were held Dec. 13 and 14, crowning new state champs in the six class divisions.
Teams are matched into classes based on school enrollment size from the previous academic year, as well as co-op status and past performance. The eight teams with the best record in each class qualify for postseason tournaments (48 qualifying teams in total).
In the title game for Class LL, Greenwich High School blanked West Haven High School 14-0. Greenwich won its second state title in the past three years and its 10th in school history.
In a repeat of last year’s Class L championship, New Canaan High School defeated Darien High School for the second year in a row. New Canaan’s 35-21 victory marked the school’s third straight Class L crown.
In the title game for Class MM, Masuk High School stunned top seeded Windsor High School 24-21. It was Masuk’s first state championship since 2010 and third in school history. Windsor was previously undefeated this year and had won the semifinal game 50-0.
In the Class M championship game, St. Joseph High School won a 21-20 nailbiter against Brookfield High School. St. Joseph was up 21-0 in the third quarter, but undefeated Brookfield responded with three consecutive touchdowns. Brookfield was unsuccessful on a two-point conversion attempt with one minute to play and the game ended. St. Joseph took home a state trophy for the 16th time in school history, most recently in 2019.
In the title game for Class SS, Killingly High School won 48-33 over Sheehan High School. Killingly has appeared in five championship games in the last seven years and has won three of them.
In the championship for Class S, Ansonia High School defeated reigning champions Bloomfield High School 58-12. The win marked Ansonia’s 22nd all-time state championship with 33 total title appearances, the most in state history.
Ansonia defeated Woodland Regional High School 30-23 in the Class S semifinals. Woodland and Ansonia were the only two Naugatuck Valley League teams to advance beyond the quarterfinal round in any class this year. JFK High School (LL), Naugatuck (L), Torrington (MM) and Watertown (M) each lost in the first round.
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LAKEVILLE — Stephen S. Myers, 82, of Lakeville, (formerly of New York City, Almond, New York, Kane’ohe, Hawaii, and Fair Oaks, California) passed away peacefully at his home on Nov. 30, 2024. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth “Betsy” (Phelan), his two sons Matthew and Shepherd, two nephews and three nieces.
Stephen was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, on Oct. 29, 1942, the son of the late Elwood Mosman and Donnie Marguerite Myers. Growing up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Stephen struggled with dyslexia in multiple high schools, ultimately graduating from Avon Old Farms High School in Avon, Connecticut.
Before attending Pratt Institute, he lived in a beach shack Shelter Island for a year and remembered this as a time when “you could walk the beach and eat the fish.” At Pratt he met his wife, Betsy, and helped to establish photography as a major there with the assistance of his friend Robert Mapplethorpe. As one of the first wave of artists to move to the Cast Iron District in Lower Manhattan, he and Betsy renovated a 3,200 square-foot loft and became one of many artists illegally living in the Soho loft spaces. They ran a photo studio for commercial clients, as well as doing street photography, including a role as the club photographer for the Alien Nomads’ MC or Motorcycle Club (which later became the New York City Hells Angels Chapter). He was a major contributor to New Journalism in New York City with Milton Glaser and Clay Felker during the 1960’s and 1970’s. His investigative photojournalism was featured in major stories about media figures along with current events in New York City and upstate New York. He documented multiple artists, musicians and notable persons (including Jim Morrison and The Doors, Sly and The Family Stone, Eddie Egan, Russell Means, Dennis Banks, John Lee Hooker, and Count Basie) from the Sixties to the present.
In the late 1970’s Stephen and Betsy relocated to Western New York where he continued his photography work full time, including becoming a field tester for Eastman Kodak’s pre-production professional films and papers, as well as photos in the ad campaigns to introduce the product to the marketplace. His North Coast Native American mask photography for the American Museum of Natural History was used extensively across dozens of publications. He was a runner-up for the 1998 Ellie National Magazine Award for his LIFE Magazine article about his plant photography in which he was featured.
In 1988 Stephen and his wife led a grassroots resistance campaign, with the help of physicist Theodore “Ted” Taylor and the local community, against the New York State government over a proposed low-level radioactive dump. Rallying everyone from hardscrabble farmers, the sheriff, political leaders, academics, media, and even the members of the local Mennonite community, they were able to increase their ranks and bring many disparate groups together. At one point Stephen read the Declaration of Independence to an audience of over 5,000 at a county-wide meeting. He considered this day, and the fact that the entire campaign remained a form of nonviolent protest, to be among his greatest accomplishments. This activism led to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge, New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992), which is the first enduring challenge of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They were able not only to stop construction of the dump, but also to change how the federal government would handle the disposal and containment of such waste for future generations.
His work was published in LIFE Magazine, New York Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, Fortune, A.D. Magazine, New Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Natural History Magazine, VIVA Magazine, Seventeen, Audience Magazine, Working Woman, National Lampoon, The Saturday Review, and NOVA. Prints of his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Fenimore Art Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, George Eastman House, the Robert L. Pfannebecker Collection, the Almond Historical Society Archives, American Museum of Natural History, Robert Sobieszek Collection, Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, George Eastman House, the Sidney Clark Collection at Avon Old Farms, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) Collection, and Kroch Library’s Rare Manuscript Collections at Cornell University.
After raising his children in Western New York State, he and Betsy lived in various places before returning to the Northeast. Stephen had a lifelong passion and love for woodworking, painting (oil & watercolor), restoring antiques, attending estate sales and flea markets, listening to music, and riding his bicycle with his sons.
WEST CORNWALL — Ella L. Clark, 83, a social worker, writer, and lover of nature and the Post Office, died Nov. 7, 2024 at Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie, after an acute stroke. Her family was with her in her last week.
Ella was predeceased by her parents, Benjamin S. and Charlotte L. Clark, her brother, Benjamin Clark, and her sister Tib Clark. Ella is survived by her daughter, Cristina Mathews of Fort Bragg, California, and her husband Jason and son Milo, her son Alexander Mathews, of Newton, Massachusetts, and his wife Olivia and children Ariana, Damian, and Torey, her daughter Jessica Meyer, of Pacific Palisades, California, and her husband Tim and children Ione and Nikos; and her sister Charlotte de Bresson of Paris.
Ella was born in New York City on Dec. 23, 1940. She was educated at Milton Academy and Radcliffe College. She married Richard Mathews in 1965; soon after, they traveled more than a thousand miles down the Yukon River. After building a house in Amenia, they moved, with their two children, Alexander and Cristina, then 2 and 3, onto a fishing boat, and fished commercially, first in southeast Alaska for salmon, and then up and down the West Coast for albacore.
In fall 1972, Ella moved on shore with the children, and her marriage ended. In Point Reyes Station, California, she found a close community of artists and carpenters and became involved in community projects. With Jonathon Meyer she had her third child, Jessica.
Ella moved back East in 1983, landing in Sharon. She was an EMT on the Sharon volunteer ambulance crew, and worked at Oblong Books in Millerton.
Ella’s real career began in 1988, when she began working for the town of Sharon as a social worker. For 31 years, she threw herself into the work, focusing especially on affordable housing, health services, and fuel assistance. Ella founded several organizations, including the Chore Service and the Sharon Community Foundation. She served on various boards and commissions, including the Sharon Hospital Board and the Cornwall Conservation Board. Ella was delighted to be named the Grange Citizen of the Year in 2007.
Ella was a prolific correspondent and writer. Ella enjoyed research, number crunching, and analysis to support grant applications and reports. She was a frequent Cornwall Chronicle contributor, often writing about the natural world, always choosing interesting, non-obvious topics. She loved digging into archives, getting the facts and voices right, and winnowing down what she had learned to the compact size the Chronicle demanded.
Ella moved to West Cornwall in 1991. Firmly rooted on Town Street, she “loved bird watching, taking photos of bears, smoking cigarettes after dinner, fighting for equity for all people, and putting orange peels on top of the fireplace,” as her granddaughter Ariana remembers.
A celebration of Ella’s life will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 19, 2025, at the Cornwall Village Meeting House, 8 Bolton Hill Road, Cornwall, Connecticut.
