Marginal Tenkara

[I’m posting some of my previous fishing journal entries as trip reports – my plan is to write future trip reports directly as they happen on the blog, but I’ve got three months of gaining experience from a standing start in tenkara, so might as well document it.  This is a report on the first time we fished in Iowa, and the first time I’d fly fished since I think I was 21 years old.  Which is a long time ago.]

Weather: cold first thing in morning, warming to 68 and sunny

Camped with James at Six Pines Campground, Backbone State Park on Friday night.  Got there lateish, nearly dark.  Set up camp, cooked veggie beef chili on the Coleman, made a fire in the fire pit, James roasted some marshmallows.  The chili with half a ciabatta loaf was lovely, but a bit spicy for James.  Very cold first night ever of camping, slightly below zero (in the system used in most of the civilized world – I understand cold weather in Celsius and warm weather in Farenheit, literally have to convert back and forth depending), but fine.  A raccoon stole the garbage bag at 4.45 am, had to run through brambles in my underwear and bare legs to get it back and put it in the car trunk.  Silly to have left it out.  The morning was very cold, frost on the Coleman, chairs, tent, car.  I made bacon, mushrooms, fried eggs over easy for breakfast on the Coleman along with four cups of Starbucks Colombian coffee.

Continue reading (Retro Trip Report) 2015 April 11 – Richmond Springs, Backbone State Park, Delaware County, IA

Weather: sunny with slight breeze in morning; clouding over by 2 pm; rain shower in afternoon but no thunder.  Temperature in high 70s.

I’m slowly starting to get the hang of fly tying, at least basic stuff like yarn, wire, marabou, chenille, and the whip finish.  Hackles remain a major challenge.  By the time of this trip I’d rounded up the necessary materials and tied 10 killer bugs, 10 Utah killer bugs, and three killer buggers.  All seem tied pretty much to standard and I’ve proven that my home-tied versions of the killer bugs catch fish like crazy, so I’m fairly confident I’ve gotten competent at these.  I also tied six San Juan worms with fine red chenille.  The day before the trip, squirmy wormy material arrived from J. Stockard, so I tied two of these, basically just subbing squirmy wormy for the chenille in the SJW pattern.  They were difficult to tie as putting three wraps over tended to pull the very malleable squirmy wormy off the shank in strange directions.  It turns out from YouTube that it’s best to include wire and secure the squirmy wormy with just one wrap of wire in three places, not thread.  The wire also provides some weight, which when fishing it was clear was really necessary.  I also tried to tie my own conehead woolly bugger, but the result was not pretty.  The cone wouldn’t fit on the Daiichi 1720 so I had to use the new 2220 streamer hooks I bought for Mickey Finn attempts.  I ended up with too much tail, a reversed hackle, and a fat, gimpy fly.  Sigh.  I have to learn, as woolly buggers turned out to be key on Bear.  The first fly I tied myself that I ever caught a fish on was a woolly bugger and I can tie plain ones reasonably well.

Continue reading (Retro Trip Report) 2015 June 24 – Grannis and Bear Creeks, Fayette County, IA

 

Few things on Earth have pleased me as much lately as my just-turned-eight year old son turning out to have the fly fishing gene.  He’s a machine.  Powers through weeds higher than him.  Keeps score.  Because the score is important.  Creek chub cower at his passage.

James engages with a Nissin Fine Mode Kosansui 320, which earlier this year TenkaraBum was selling as his kid’s starter set.  He has a pair of youth chest waders that are a bit big for him and a Moonlit Fly Fishing vest which is way too big for him, but he likes it.

It’s startling how he’s taken to it.  He casts a 3.5 level line and puts flies where he wants them to go.  He can identify fish species.  He releases most of his fish himself, except when they’ve taken it a bit deep (common shiners are bad for this) and I step in with the fine nosed pliers.  Most of all, he just goes and goes and goes.  We don’t push things, obviously, because he’s only eight.  But there’s no real compromise involved – it’s two dudes fishing.  He gets snagged and his tippet gets snarled.  But I get snagged and my tippet gets snarled.  Pretty much as often.  Days on the stream with my son feel sort of achingly precious.

 

So, having tumbled back into hopeless fly fishing obsession after a nearly 30 year break, I guess I’m going to document my foibles.  Shortly after the new year it dawned on me that I don’t actually have that many years left to do stuff.  So I decided to do something I’d been mulling for years: ultralight backpacking.  I started making gear lists, reading reviews, planning trips.  And I bought a full load out of gear.  At some point, somewhere (I think at Backpacking North), someone mentioned tenkara.  I googled it, found Tenkara USA, and that was that. I have managed to go on one major ultralight trip, a week spent doing a 40 mile loop hike in Utah’s Dark Canyon Wilderness.  But the tenkara fishing started at the beginning of April.  Five rods, a vise, and too many orders from J. Stockard and TenkaraBum later, I basically live to fish again.

My first flyfishing career was long ago, during high school in northwestern Alberta, Canada.  My friend Dean and I fished the freestone streams in the wilderness (“bush” in the local parlance of the time) southwest of Grande Prairie.  Every minute we could, between the time they ran clear at the end of June and the time they froze in November.  The main targets were Arctic Grayling, Rocky Mountain Whitefish, and Dolly Varden trout (/char, but more musings on what those words actually mean in a later post).  We were using western fibreglass rods.  I had a cheap Canadian Tire vest but some UK relative gave me a beautiful Wheatley compartmentalized dry fly box.  The grayling were suckers for a #12 Royal Coachman dry.  In those days I used to carry a spin rig with me loaded I think with small Panther Martins for the dollys, something I don’t think I’d do now.  Anyway, I moved away east for university, fished the next two summers when I came home, stopped moving home for the summers, and that was that.  I didn’t really decide to stop, though I retroactively told myself that I didn’t really like annoying the fish and that hiking in wilderness and just being at a stream was enough.  That turns out to be…inaccurate.

I knew that there was trout fishing in Iowa when I moved here from the UK in 1999 and I kinda sorta had plans to explore it.  But I was a brand new academic with tenure on my mind and I didn’t take the plunge.  I would pass by the local outdoor shop with its fly fishing section and occasionally think wistfully about it, but never acted on it.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure that fishing in Iowa could really compare to fishing in the Canadian wilderness.

But now here I am, shopping for Trout Bum license plate frames.  I’ve been keeping a fishing journal since falling back into it, and it occurred to me I might as well put it in a blog instead.  So, trip reports, musings, gear posts (though I have absolutely no expertise, so gear reports based on amateur subjective impressions).  Trout don’t exactly fear me (note, e.g., the dayglo orange fleece, since traded for a TenkaraBum woodland camo t-shirt; trout were probably nudging other trout and saying “You gotta see this…”).  But I’m working on it.