Wakasagi Fishing

And now for something a little different.

With no guides to freeze, a tenkara rod is an excellent choice for winter fishing, and it seems there'll be a lot of people fishing with one this winter - in the US, that is, not in Japan.

As near as I can tell, because the season is closed there is no winter tenkara fishing in Japan. What is hot in Japan now is wakasagi (smelt) fishing. Ice fishing for smelt is a big deal in Japan. People ice fish for smelt here, too, but it is nothing like it is in Japan.

Ice fishing here can be anything from a guy hunkered down, sitting on a bucket, back to the wind, staring at a hole in the ice all the way up to what would pass for someone's den or at the very least a serious man-cave were it not on runners and out on a frozen lake. Target species are much more likely to be perch or walleye or pike or even trout rather than smelt. From the videos I've seen, smelt fishing in Japan is much more of a communal thing, with people sitting next to each other in front of perhaps a one foot by 30 foot hole in what looks more like a medium sized greenhouse.

The equipment is different as well. Here guys fish with short hand-held rods or perhaps a bunch of tip-ups set across the ice. There it has become quite high tech. Short, extremely flexible rods are attached to electric reels that look more like the mouse to your computer, or at least what the mouse would look like if it were attached to a little rod rather than a wire.

I think the smelt there must be in pretty deep water, and the electric reels allow precise depth control, quick descent of the baits and also a very rapid reeling in of the fish.

It is quite a ways away from the extreme simplicity of a stick and a piece of string, but if you like high tech toys it might be fun (and deep fried wakasagi are supposed to be pretty good). If you did that here you'd have to be careful where you fish, though, because it looks like even a modest perch could pull one of the rods off it's, um, perch.

And if you wanted to try it out, I'm sure I could get you a rod and electric reel, although the instructions will be only in Japanese.

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