Oh, the joys of the Tenkara rod

Back in February I received a handsome gift from my occasional fishing buddy Ian Davison: a Temple Fork Outfitters 10-foot 6-inch rod — the Soft Hackle.

It’s an unusual rod in that it uses no reel. Instead it has a fixed length of line.

Oh, and it telescopes out. When collapsed it’s about the size of a piccolo.

(We now pause while you Google “piccolo length.”)

I had no idea how to set it up, and when I tried sliding it out I did it wrong and the tip fell out.

Sometimes you just have to punt. I wrapped the thing back up and waited for summer, when my benefactor would be around to assist.

Which he did.

And after fishing with it for a couple of weeks, I am well and truly hooked.

The name for this style of fly fishing is Tenkara. It is Japanese. It is old. 

And it is a lot of fun.

There are many, many different rods available. And lines. And opinions on how to use them.

I wound up with a short length of braided line attached to the little cord thing that is attached to the rod tip.

I tied a loop in the free end and attached a 6-foot furled leader designed for a five or six weight fly line. I then added about 4 feet of stout monofilament to the furled leader’s tippet ring, to get to about 11 feet of “line.”

I then added a piece of 8-pound fluorocarbon to that, to create a dropper.

I tied on two big flies: a conehead Wooly Bugger (black with rubber legs) and a bead head Wooly Bugger, legless.

And with the water level in the Housatonic River very low and warm, I charged right into the long riffle just below the Falls Village power station and started fishing.

The first thing I noticed was my left hand kept searching for a non-existent fly line. This stopped after an hour or so.

The second thing I noticed was a goodish small-mouth that had attacked the black Bugger.

And the third thing I noticed was my net, which had become detached, floating downstream.

In this day and age, when every little thing, no matter how insignificant, is captured for posterity by some amateur auteur with a cell phone, I wish someone had been on duty to record me as I danced down the riffle, rod held high to keep the fish, while stabbing at the net with the wading staff.

I retrieved both net and small-mouth bass, for a memorable first fish on the Tenkara rod.

I’ve been using it ever since, with different arrangements of tippets and flies, overall line length and casts.

This particular model is great with streamers and nymphs, or a dry-dropper combo, or a team of wets, or a single dry fly.

It is not so hot for Euro-nymphing — a little squishy for that kind of work.

I thought for sure it would break when I hooked a decent fish — but a 4-pound smallie came to the net without undue hassle, as did an 18-inch rainbow that was, against all odds, hanging out in the tepid bathwater just below the rapids where the kayak gates are.

I consulted with an expert, Christopher Stewart of the Tenkara Bum website and store.

He informed me my rod is on the bigger side of the Tenkara spectrum, and would be appropriate for even bigger game, such as large-mouth bass.

I ordered a smaller rod from him, for chasing brook trout in little streams. It was not a budget-breaker.

Some tentative observations, in addition to the above:

•If you are an indicator nympher, this style will seem seriously weird. If you are a dry fly man, much less so. 

 • And if you are like me, a wet fly-swinging, Euro-nymphing, Davy Wotton-obsessed fool, this rod feels like an old friend.

• I am much more aware of my position in the river with the fixed line. I have to be; the fixed line necessarily restricts the area I can fish. I can’t cover that riffle over there with a longer cast and a mend or two — I have to move. 

And that’s a good thing overall. I don’t move around as much as I should. If I’ve shown my fly or flies to a fish or group of fish four or five times without a strike, I’m just boring them, and I need to move along.

• Sometime soon I am going on a bottom-to-top crawl of a brook trout stream that runs through a rugged ravine with the guy who got me started on this in the first place. It will take all day, and being able to collapse the rod and stick it in the day pack will be very handy — as opposed to clambering around with an assembled 7-foot fly rod.

Does this replace my fly rods? 

No. 

But I’ve been catching good fish consistently with the thing, and having a lot of fun in the process.