Hi. My name's Chris and I'm a Tenkara Bum.

Tenkara Bum

I grew up in Colorado and learned to fly fish on the St. Vrain River. This was long before a famous fishing writer moved to its banks and started writing about it - back when I'm sure people two counties over never fished it and people two states over never heard of it. Its a small stream, or three actually, the North, the Middle and the South St. Vrain. They would be great streams for a tenkara rod but I moved away long before I had become a tenkara bum.

Now I live in New York City, and like most New Yorkers I don't have a car. I fish the streams that run between the New York City Reservoirs and get to them via the subway and then the commuter trains. (Tenkara rods aren't just for backpackers!) The streams are small, the fishing is good, and most fishermen drive right past them to get to the more famous rivers in the Catskills. Suits me just fine.

I learned about tenkara by accident. I had seen a photo of a North Country soft hackle fly on the internet and was struck by it's simplicity and it's almost austere beauty. I tried to find out all I could about soft hackle flies and how to fish them. Through reading both early and contemporary accounts, I decided that a rod much longer than my 8' Phillipson Premium was needed to get the most out of them.

I couldn't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a new rod, new reel and new line, so I started looking for alternatives. I found David Webster's book, The Angler and the Loop Rod. He used a long rod, no reel and a horsehair line tied to the rod tip even though reels and silk line had already been in general use for decades. As a professional fisherman, he had to use what worked. If a long rod and no reel worked for him, I thought it would work for me.

In the course of my research on loop rods and the horsehair lines that were used with them, I came across a reference to tenkara. Tenkara rods are similar to loop rods and traditionally they used horsehair lines. Virtually no one fishes with loop rods anymore, but tenkara is still popular in Japan. The information is current and the equipment is modern.

At that point, no one sold tenkara rods in the US, and I had no idea how to import one from Japan. I spent the better part of a year trying different crappie rods, which I figured were as close as I could come to a real tenkara rod. When I tell people not to use a crappie rod because a real tenkara rod is so much better, I speak from experience.

Finding information about tenkara was hard. Most of it was in Japanese, and the computerized translation just isn't very good. My goal for the TenkaraBum site is to provide the kind of information that I wish had been available when I was just starting out. I'm afraid my tone may come off a bit like "I did this and I did that" but I'm just trying to share my experiences. It's hard to write "You'll do this and you'll do that" because the way you like to fish and your preferences in rods and lines may be completely different than mine.

I've been accused of trying to "define tenkara." I'm not trying to tell you how you should fish. There are no "Tenkara Police." But most Western anglers still don't know what tenkara is - and I'm sure many will want to learn more after they first hear about it. I feel it is a disservice to them to let comments that suggest tenkara is just dapping or glorified cane pole fishing go unchallenged. Similarly, I feel it is a disservice to them to let comments that suggest they've already been doing it for years without ever realizing it go unchallenged. Tenkara fishing is a technique all its own, and to do it well requires specialized equipment. It's easy to learn, and it doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment, but it's hard to mimic with any other rod.

I love it, but you may not. I don't expect that very many people will give up fly fishing entirely in favor of tenkara (although some surely will). It won't replace a fly rod for all situations and for all fish. I used to say it's good unless you're fishing for steelhead or bonefish, but then a guy caught an atlantic salmon with a tenkara rod last year, and another guy caught a bonefish with one this year. What can I say now - other than give it a try. You might like it.

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Chris Stewart
Tenkara Bum

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