Tenkara Videos

Hans Florine is best known for his rock climbing career, which includes setting the record for the fastest ascent of El Capitan (climbing 3,000ft of vertical rock in 2 hours and 23 minutes…in a place most people take 3 days to climb).
Last year I got to meet Hans, someone who’s greatly inspired my own interest in rock climbing. He was interested in teaching his young son how to fly-fish and realized tenkara would be a great tool for that. A couple of weeks ago he came to Boulder and we connected for a morning of fishing followed by an afternoon of rock climbing. Here’s a short video I made of him talking about where tenkara fits in with his climbing lifestyle.

This week Joe Egry shows us how to tie the tenkara fly from the Kurobe region of Japan. Unlike most other flies in the Tenkara Fly Tying Video Series, the Kurobe kebari doesn’t feature the typical reverse hackle. Enjoy it.

This video is part of our Tenkara Fly Tying Video Series, with a new video coming out every week to show you how to tie a tenkara fly.

In this week’s Tenkara Fly Tying Video we bring you renowned rock climber, and tenkara aficionado, Malcolm Daly. The lesson here, watch out for that super glue!

In this week’s Tenkara Fly-Tying Video, we feature Graham Moran, the blogger behind TenkaraGrasshopper. The Tenkara Fly-Tying Video Series features a new video of a tenkara fly being tied every week. Watch all videos here.
Happy New Year everyone!

In 2013, we were pitched the idea of sponsoring a film about two brothers who absolutely love fly-fishing. The story would be centered on the Trow brothers, who own and run the Mossy Creek Fly-Fishing shop in Virginia. I have gotten to know those guys well, Brian and Colby are some of the early adopters of tenkara, were one of the first shops to offer our products and also helped host the 3rd Tenkara Summit. I knew they would be a great presence in a film, and in their waters there would be great opportunities to capture some awesome tenkara footage in the streams of the Smoky Mountains. So, we sponsored Blood Knot.  The film was accepted into several film festivals, and deservingly won accolades from all of them, including “Film of the Year” award by Drake Magazine. Enjoy the clip below (can you spot tenkara?),  and pre-order a DVD or rent it on Vimeo if you want to see one of the best fly-fishing films ever (with plenty of tenkara footage), and keep an eye out for the digital versions coming soon.

Rent on Vimeo
PRE-ORDER DVD
Coming to iTunes and fly shops near you in early 2015.

In today’s weekly video for our Tenkara Fly-Tying Video Series, John Geer shows some fly tying without a vise. This video goes very well with our newly released “No tools Tenkara Fly-Tying kits” which have been incredibly popular.

If you like the video above, you may also want to check out the video of Mr. Amano tying flies without a vise.

Still looking for a holiday gift? What about the most innovative tenkara rods around?
Louis Cahill from the must-follow blog Gink & Gasoline, stopped by our booth at a tradeshow earlier this year and did a great video about tenkara and our new tenkara rods, the Sato and Rhodo tenkara rods. My favorite quote in the piece he wrote to go with the video is probably “tenkara has spread like pink eye in kindergarten“, I guess that’s true, but without any of the symptoms. Here’s the video he made:

Even I can find myself with a broken tenkara rod tip in need of repair. The odds implied that it was bound to happen. After about 6 years of tenkara fishing and opening and closing tenkara rods thousands and thousands of times, this weekend I was fishing in the Pacific Northwest when I broke the tip of my tenkara rod, for the first time ever not on purpose. It was my fault, I hurriedly tried to pull the line out and didn’t heed to my main advice: always keep the hard tip of the rod inside the handle segment while pulling line out of the spool.
Still, even though we were almost done for the day I tried to make the best of the situation by making a field repair of my tenkara rod tip with some spare replacement lillian I had on the rod. It was my first time attempting a field repair of the tenkara rod tip out of necessity. Watch to learn what to do if you find yourself with a broken tenkara rod tip.

One of the messages I want to spread far and wide through tenkara is that you don’t have to be a fisherman to fish, nor do you have to go on a dedicated fishing trip to enjoy fishing. Fly-fishing, and more specifically tenkara, can go with any activity you choose to enjoy.

This past weekend I put a couple of tenkara rods and some climbing equipment in my pack and flew to North Carolina to explore some canyons with the guys of Pura Vida Adventures. The canyons were expected to have plenty of water, and thus fish. The idea was to fish as time allowed and hopefully catch some of their purely wild and native brook trout. The beautiful thing about tenkara’s simplicity is that it can go with anything. And the beautiful thing about its minimal and portable nature is that it doesn’t take long to setup and fish along the way. That’s the idea of TENKARA+, tenkara plus ANYTHING.

Here are two fun episodes on tenkara made for the TV show “Lip’em & Rip’em”. The video was shot last year in the Minturn area of Colorado. The hosts of the show saw in tenkara a simple fly fishing method and invited me to participate. In these episodes we go through a very comprehensive view of tenkara. We talk about the tenkara rods, the philosophy behind the tenkara flies and then, how to catch and land a LOT of large trout (without ever throwing our rod in the water!)
Enjoy it, and share it with friends. Make sure to click on the gear icon and select 720 for high-definition resolution.

As you can see here, you should never have to throw your tenkara rod in the water! At least not a Tenkara USA rod.

Check out this piece and video I did with Tim Romano for Field and Stream yesterday. In this video I show you how to quickly and easily tie a tenkara fly as I talk a bit about the philosophy and reasoning behind tenkara flies. Article here.

Here’s a one-minute time-lapse of the Tenkara USA booth at the recent Fly Fishing Show in Somerset. If you want to see why we were one of the busiest booths at the show, please come by one of the shows listed below.

Fly Fishing Shows (click on this link for details on where the shows are, etc):

February 7-8: Winston-Salem, NC

February 15-16: Lynnwood, WA

February 21-23: Pleasanton, CA

March 1-2: Lancaster, PA

International Sportsmen Expo (ISE):

March 13-16: Salt Lake City, UT

OTHERS:

March 21-23: Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Rendezvous, Denver, CO

March 28-29: Wasatch Fly Fishing and Tying Expo, Salt Lake City, UT

Here’s an entertaining tenkara video made by Ron Giesecke. He created the video as a submission to the 2014 Fly Fishing Film Tour, unfortunately it wasn’t accepted. Based on the quality of at least half of the videos we saw at last year’s tour we thought this one had a pretty good chance. Well, now you get to watch it ahead of the tour, and for free.

We have put out a lot of videos since our inception in 2009. 88 to be exact. Here are 5 videos we think you must watch to learn tenkara, tenkara fly-tying, or just for your entertainment as the cold weather sets in:

1) How to cast with tenkara:

2) Tenkara Techniques:

3) Tenkara Pronunciation Guide:

4) Tenkara Knots:

4B) You may also want to watch this video on my “one knot”, used for tippet to level line and fly to tippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eemGKr-GYrE

5) How to tie a tenkara fly:

6) Landing a larger fish on tenkara and long line:

7) Tenkara and Canyoneering

In this video Daniel Galhardo, founder of Tenkara USA, shares six basic presentation techniques for tenkara. These techniques were taught to Daniel directly from the main tenkara anglers in Japan, namely: Dr. Hisao Ishigaki, Sakakibara Masami, Katsutoshi Amano and Yuzo Sebata. After learning and understanding the Japanese tenkara techniques, Daniel has synthesized the knowledge and developed them into a system of tenkara techniques listed below, which he uses when teaching clinics around the world.
1) Dead-drift: allow the fly to naturally drift with the current
2) Pausing: move the rod tip upstream from the fly to pause the fly in place for a couple of seconds in spots where fish are likely to be, such as in front of rocks.
3) Pause-and-Drift: Put the rod tip upstream from the tenkara fly to pause it for a second or two, then let it drift, pause it again, let it drift.
4) Pulsing: with a rhythmic motion move your fly up and down, making the tenkara fly pulse with life. The tenkara fly will open its hackle when you pull it, but close a bit when you relax it.
5) Pulling: this is a bit like using your fly as a streamer, where you will impart a lot of action. Part of the tenkara line must be in the water to serve as an anchor as you pull the tenkara fly across or upstream about 1 1/2ft at a time. It is particularly useful in faster or higher water conditions.
6) Plunging: This is a technique that may be combined with any of the previous 5 techniques and is used to help sink your fly without using any weight, using currents instead. Cast upstream from a place where the water drops, plunges or gets channeled between rock, as the fly hits the part where the water is more turbulent, let some of the line into the turbulence to take it down. If you’re doing it correctly and hitting a good spot, your line will seem to stop for a couple of seconds, then it may move in circles a bit, and then it will move downstream, typically fairly deep. The best way to learn this technique in particular is to go out and try fishing without weight and observe what currents do to your fly.

These techniques are the foundation of tenkara. The best way to learn them and improve on them is to go out and give them a try. There is no right or wrong in terms of how much you should move your fly, how long you should pause the tenkara fly, etc. However, in the video I do share a couple of tips that will prove useful, especially: when pulsing the fly avoid having a lot of erratic movement and focus on an easy rhythm that will allow fish to take the fly. When dead-drifting across or a bit downstream, try starting with your arm close to your body then extend it out and downstream to create a better drift.

Tenkara is simple fly fishing; these techniques for tenkara are most effective used a tenkara rod, but may also be tried with rod and reel. The tenkara techniques above, presented as they are here are a system of techniques copyrighted by Daniel Galhardo and Tenkara USA.

 
If you missed the first video in the series of tenkara foundations, here is the video on how to cast with tenkara: