Few writers in the realm of fly-fishing have achieved the iconic status of John Gierach. One of the great honors of my career has been to have piqued Gierach’s interest in tenkara, and then to fish with him on a few occasions. Last year he released his latest book, All Fishermen are Liars, I’m still debating whether the inclusion in a book with this title is something of which to be proud…but I guess I am. John and I sat down last year to have a conversation about his experiences with tenkara. We put out the video you can see below. Since that interview several people asked us to release the full interview, and the podcast is a great medium for that. So, here is our unabridged conversation…except for a couple of small cuts for when we got too distracted by his cute cats.
Daniel Galhardo: This is Daniel Galhardo and you’re listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly fishing, tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast, we’ll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It’s only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos because of your support, so we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA rods, lines and flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about this simple method of fly fishing.
DG: So I have an update on my bio to say that now I am featured in a book called, “All Fishermen Are Liars”. I’m not sure if I should be flattered by that, and I can’t really say that I ever expected in a million years to be in a book with that as the title. But I probably am very honored actually to have been included in the pages written by no other than the famous fly fishing author, John Gierach. And last year, when John released his book, “All Fishermen Are Liars”, one of his many books, all beautiful, I had the pleasure to sit down with him, do a little bit of an interview. We did that for a video to promote his book last year and… But of course, I have the audio track from our interview and the video was also kind of a very condensed form. And I thought this would be a good chance to release our interview, our entire conversation that we had that day, talking about his experiences with tenkara, what he thinks about tenkara, the industry as a whole, and things about his books and his writing as well.
DG: You might notice a couple of different cuts in the interview, and that’s because we might have had to reposition the camera. It was not like something that we sat down just as a recording for the podcast but the conversation’s there in its entirety. Mostly, I had to cut the pieces where the cats kinda came in and we got distracted by how cute they were. That was always pretty cute actually. It was very fun to have that. You will also notice that I talked, for example, about when I did the interview with Gierach, it was the day after our fifth anniversary at Tenkara USA. Now we have been in business for a total of 6 1/2 years. It’s hard to believe that I have been running the company for 6 1/2 years now. Wow, time is flying for sure but… So the interview was done last year. We recorded it in April. April 13th is the date that I have here on my digital files, and hopefully, you will enjoy listening to our conversation. The day that we went out, it was a snowy day, the day that we met for the interview, and at least here in Boulder, we were just about to get our little… Our first snow for the season. So it kinda reminded me of that day that I spent with Gierach and his cats in the writer’s den at his house.
DG: So hopefully, you will enjoy the conversation that we had. If you haven’t really picked up a book by John Gierach, I’d highly recommend you look him up and pick up a couple of books. If you wanna read his story about tenkara, pick up the last one, “All Fishermen Are Liars”. And there’s several beautiful books that I really like. He’s very famous for “Trout Bum”. That might have been the… He might have been the one that we can give credit for creating the name and the “Trout Get The Blues” I think is or… Now I’m forgetting the title. I shouldn’t go there, but in any case, listen to the interview. Let us know how you like the conversation on iTunes, if you can leave us a review, and on our podcast page, tenkarausa.com/podcast. And we’ll see what else we can come up with to top this interview. It’s gonna be hard to come up with something for our next podcast episode, but hopefully you like it. Till next time, guys.
John Gierach: Yeah. I got into tenkara because I’m a writer, always sniffing out new stuff. So I heard it was in the air. I heard about it. And it was Japanese and that intrigued me and so I started looking around and then naturally found you. You google tenkara, what do you get? You get you. And then I didn’t want to… I didn’t wanna do one of those stories where I went out for an afternoon and tried it and wrote a story. I wanted to do my due diligence. I wanted to learn how to do it. So I gave a summer to it, a season, and I didn’t fish exclusively with tenkara because I went other places, swung state rods and whatever. But around here on the small streams, I decided to give it a season and learn how to do it. And then I don’t remember if I suggested to you that you come out or if you suggested coming out, but we hooked up.
DG: Yup. I remember it because… So actually, as a matter of fact, I sent you a rod and then at one point, I forget if you email me or maybe I think you emailed me asking a question and I’m like that’s John Gierach right there. He’s gonna write about tenkara and he better know what he’s writing about. So I better go and teach it to him personally, and that’s the first time. So I kind of invited myself to your home. It was like, “Let’s go fish together and I’ll kind of show you what I’ve learned from people in Japan.” Yeah. I made sure to invite myself. Plus, one of the cool things about having a fly fishing business is that I can connect with the people that I’ve been admiring for a long time. So I kind of jumped at a chance of fishing with you.
JG: And you could write off the plane tickets.
DG: I can write off the plane tickets but mostly I can meet people that I’d been reading about in paperbacks for years before I got into the industry myself. Yeah. So I jumped at a chance of fishing with you. I thought this would be a good chance to share all the stuff that I had been learning. Yeah. So we hooked up and fished.
JG: So we hooked up and Ed Angle came up, and we fished for about three days. And then you moved to Colorado because you liked all the creeks.
DG: I did. That was a…
JG: Yeah. I didn’t foresee that. I didn’t realize you were gonna pack up and move here.
DG: Yeah. I loved… I fell in love with Colorado immediately. That was my first time in Colorado actually. So it was a nice reason to come and visit. And I don’t know if I told you the story but essentially, last year when I went to the park, and I fished a bunch after you and I fished together, and then I drove through Boulder and I immediately called Margaret, and I was like, “We have to move here.” It was such a good vibe through the whole area of the Front Range.
JG: Well, you said you were amazed. I mean, you’d come out to the house and we’d drive 15 minutes and be fishing. I mean, five minutes and we’re on the stream.
DG: Exactly.
JG: And you were telling me, “Well, I have to drive three hours from home to get on water.”
DG: I was getting so tired of driving three hours to go fishing. Yeah. And it’s all perfect tenkara water. So I created this business to spread tenkara and I’m trying to share the stories. And it’s really tiring when you have to drive three hours to do it. Yes, I called her up, and for two years, I pestered her every month. I was like, “We gotta move to Colorado.” She’s like, “No, I don’t wanna go away from family and… ” But it finally just happened. Yeah. Now we’re 30 minutes away from each other. That’s pretty cool.
JG: But anyway… Yeah. We fish together, and I had fished… I’d fish for a couple of months off and on with tenkara before that, and I just found it to be really interesting and compelling. You know I don’t do it exclusively by any means, but that’s just because of what I do for a living. I just… I have to go out and do other stuff, and I really… I’d take you in the other room and show you stacks and stacks of fly rods and piles of fly boxes. I just… I really liked the simplicity of tenkara, but I really like the… I really like all the complicated googahs of conventional fly fishing too so.
DG: Well, you had a quote in your book, it was not a story in tenkara. It was a different one about how for… In a way, I think having a combination of habits and some brand loyalties, and we can probably extrapolate that to be… To have a habits as well as a certain way that you’ve been doing fishing for a while. It keeps your life simple in the way too. So it’s kind of a… So I can see that. You’ve been fly fishing for… How long have you been fly fishing now?
JG: It’s gotta be… Gotta be over 40 years.
DG: So about 40 years before you discovered tenkara.
JG: Yeah, more or less.
DG: And that puts you in a very interesting position too because you’ve seen so much stuff come and go in fly fishing. You’ve seen so many different things, so many different rods. Where do you think tenkara fits in with fly fishing, within fly fishing? What has it done for fly fishing, if anything?
JG: Well, at first, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I didn’t have an opinion one way or another. I just thought it was interesting. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it had been a flash in a pan like new rods or something or like actually I think switch rods are probably gonna end up being in a few more years. But it wouldn’t have surprised me if it was just a thing that happened for a while and then you didn’t hear anymore about it, but it’s really caught on. It’s caught on surprisingly well. I didn’t see the film tour in Boulder. I saw it up here at a benefit in Lyons, but I heard when that piece came on where guys were tenkara fishing, the audience applauded and so it’s gotten to be a thing around here. And like you say, it’s… A lot of the water around here is real friendly to it. That complicated pocket water where it’s all about drift and you have to get close and high stick and all that stuff, well that’s what tenkara is so.
DG: One of my favorite quotes, I think and I use that on occasion in my presentations is, you say that you sometimes giggle out loud at the long beaches ahead and beautiful drifts you were getting and some fly…
JG: Yeah. I don’t giggle out loud anymore. I’m getting used to it. At first, yeah. It was pretty cool.
DG: So you were there by yourself fishing and you just let a giggle out, just like, “Ah.”
JG: Well, I do… Yeah, I do that anyway.
DG: I love that quote. Let me backtrack a little bit because we were talking a little bit about where tenkara came in. It could’ve been a flash in the pan, but it’s not. It’s something that’s been around for a long time. And even though you also acknowledge in a book that one of the famous fly fisherman said that you would have probably be a fad, I don’t know if he used that word or not, but it still stay. Actually, as a matter of fact, yesterday was our fifth year anniversary. We just completed five years. But one of the things… One of the interesting things that we’ve seen with tenkara is like all these very, very experienced fly fishermen taking it up because they know it can be simpler than… Fly fishing could be simpler than it’s made out to be. And then tons of beginners that are usually have been intimidated by fly fishing and they’re like, “Oh, this is an easy way to get into it.” More so, the very experienced and the beginner than the people in the middle that are just hard core fly fisherman, fly fishing really heavily for 5-10 years, why do you think that… Why do you think it is that we have so much of that very experienced fly angler taking up tenkara and the beginner but maybe not so much in the middle? Do you have any thoughts on that?
JG: Well, I actually wasn’t aware of that, but I would say the guys in the middle are still trying to learn what they’re doing. So they’re not looking for anything new, and beginners are obvious. A beginner comes at fly fishing, and we were just talking about this the other night. Beginner comes at fly fishing and he looks at all the flies and all the rods and all… I’ve got a line catalog here, and it’s like 51, 52 pages of lines that you might need. And in fact, you need maybe two. So people are intimidated by that. And when they look at tenkara, they go, “Yeah. You get a rod, you get a line, you get a fly, what else?” Well, nothing. And spool of tippet, maybe clippers, and that’s it. And I think people just go, “Oh, yeah. That’s what I was hoping for, something like that.” And then the more experienced people, they’re more experienced. They’ve got the stuff, they know how to use it, they know how to catch fish, and then it’s something new. So yeah. Do I buy another… Do I buy a seventh or eighth or ninth rod and reel and a new line or do I buy a tenkara rod and try this?
JG: So what I’m interested in, there are some… I know there’s a handful of guys who just do it exclusively. And what I’m curious about is how many people are gonna do it like I do it, which is like… Where it seems appropriate, where it seems like it’s the best way to fish or would be the most fun. But then, if I’m gonna go someplace and fish king salmon, I’d probably not gonna want a tenkara rod. I don’t want a 14-foot 10-weight spey rod. So I see it as one art thing in the arsenal.
DG: Yeah. I think a large extent to this… There’s all this different target fish for example that… There’s always that thing of having the appropriate tool for the job. So we’ve always stayed away… We’re probably the first ones to say, “This is not designed for steelhead fishing.” Tenkara is really… It’s ideal for certain situation like mountain streams. That’s where it shines. And honestly, when I look at people fly fishing all the mountain streams that we have in this area, it looks so cumbersome. Now that I do tenkara… I’ve been fly fishing for, I think, 13 years when I discovered tenkara. And I loved it but now that I look back, it’s like when you fish in moving water, there’s no better tool, in my opinion. You just… ‘Cause you do get those beautiful drifts on the other side of the currents and the seams, and they can really get very effectively with a heavy line touching the water and you have to mend it.
DG: So we do see a good mix of the… Maybe talking more specifically about the experienced fly angler, they take out tenkara like I did. When I first discovered tenkara, bought a rod in Japan, brought it back. On my first trip, I took my tenkara rod and my western fly rod and I kinda used it half of the time, either rod half of the time. And on my second trip, I also brought both of my rods along. And I just started with the tenkara rod and I just didn’t stop using it, and that was it. For me, that’s like… I stopped using my other stuff ’cause I fish moving water pretty much for trout exclusively. But if I was fishing, if I was going on a trip to go fishing for salmon, I probably would rent a rod nowadays ’cause I don’t have any other stuff anymore. [chuckle] But I guess that it was actually…
JG: You know enough fishermen so they could lend you one.
DG: Yeah. I can probably borrow one. But like yesterday, we had… So yesterday was our fifth year anniversary and in our blog, I put a “We’re doing a five rod giveaway” just to kinda celebrate that. And in less 24 hours, we had 280 comments on our blog. So essentially, I asked people to put a comment in there about what tenkara has done for them or what their experience has been with tenkara. And there’s a couple common themes which kinda go with the beginner and also the experienced angler. And for the beginner, they’re like, “Thank you for introducing this here.” It’s like, “It allowed me to go fly fishing.” But then there’s a lot of these comments from the experienced anglers, saying, “Yeah. I started doing tenkara. It changed my fly fishing forever.” And there was a lot of them saying, “Now my other rods are gathering dust.” And it’s one of those things. If you fish a certain type of water, it does the job and you probably don’t have to carry.
JG: Yeah. I think there are fewer and fewer people who fish one kind of water all the time, and I actually kind of envy that. I wonder if I didn’t do this for a living, I wonder if I wouldn’t just fish into the creeks and be done with it. Probably not ’cause there’s too many fish and too many cool places to go. But what’s been an interest to me is how many of the experienced fly fishermen go exclusively with tenkara. I think some but probably not many. And how many of the beginners who start with tenkara are gonna finally say, “Well, what if I wanna cast in the middle of the lake or what if I need more line, more cast?” So I don’t know. I think it’ll just be interesting.
DG: One example too, I don’t know if you saw that this last week, Patagonia started selling tenkara rods.
JG: I saw that, yeah.
DG: And it’s completely driven by Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia, and he’s one of those people that… He’s one of the very experienced anglers in the country, and he does one of two things. Last he told me he does spey fishing for salmon or steelhead or tenkara for pretty much anything else. So that’s the two things, and those are two different ends of the spectrum.
JG: Pretty much, yeah.
DG: So if you’re fishing this big fish, there’s a tool for that. If you’re catching trout primarily, tenkara does pretty much all of that. So I think that’s one example that we see a fair amount. But tell me a little bit… Something that was very interesting when I came to visit you and I didn’t know before and you do talk about in the book is the fact that you actually had a real curiosity and interest in Japanese culture from college and that type of thing. So tell me about that a little bit.
JG: Well, it’s just an amateur thing and it came out of the counterculture. We were interested in Zen back in the ’60s for obvious reasons. And it was just that. I always appreciated Japanese art and Japanese poetry and Japanese movies for that matter.
DG: But you’ve also done Japanese… You did like Japanese poetry back in college and you also have Gyotaku, which is the Japanese trout painting.
JG: I’ve done some Gyotaku now and then. Yeah, I’m full grown with that. And I’ve got a couple of Bonsai trees upstairs and… Yeah. I’ve just always appreciated that sensibility. Of course, as Ed points out… Michael, where’s my other cat, Koki. As Ed points out, the Japan were interested in was pretty much over a 1000 years ago but I think you can find remnants of it here and there. All right Koki, such a good picture.
DG: Yeah. That’s funny. You got a great picture of her essentially nose in the fish in the water as you would see. It’s almost as if she was checking out the fish. It’s awesome.
JG: Well you remember, I think the last time you were out here, this cat was all over you. Remember we’re sitting up on the porch?
DG: Yeah, yeah. I think he came into my room in the middle of the night a couple of times or something.
JG: Yeah. She has this thing about getting in bed with strange men. I’m glad she’s not a teenage girl. Yeah, so that was probably the reason I didn’t just shrug and go, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Japanese must be cool, ancient Japanese. So yeah man, I thought it would be cool.
DG: Do you think that’s part of what really kinda intrigued you and prompted you to give it a try, the fact that it was Japanese or do you think it’s more because it was fishing?
JG: Well yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. At first, yeah, well of course it was fishing. But yeah at first, that was what interested me about it and then now I don’t care. I don’t care where it came from.
DG: It’s just a cool method of fishing?
JG: Yeah. It’s just… For places where it’s appropriate, it’s really fun.
DG: So tell us a little bit about your book in general. What does John Gierach write about?
JG: I write about travel and fly fishing, and I’m interested in the places people go to fly fish and I mean civilizations as well as the habitat. And I’m interested in the people who do it and why they do it. And I’ve been told… Well it’s been pointed out to me that in the last couple of books, I’m writing more like a travel writer and less like a fly fishing writer. So there’s plenty of fishing and plenty of fish get caught but it’s more about where I go and people I meet and…
DG: Well I think there was at least one story that was good. What did you call it? The Temporary…
JG: Oh, Temporarily Purist.
DG: Temporarily Purist. I thought that was kinda like a nice philosophical piece. It’s not really much about traveling if at all. I thought it was kind of a nice piece as well because it’s like, “Yeah, we can try different things. We do have one thing that appeals to us the most.” So tell me a little bit, are you a purist, a dry fly purist but tenkara is kinda something that comes in once in a while?
JG: Well, no. That story was out about being a temporary purist where when it’s dry fly season, I’m a dry fly purist and then when it’s not, I then fish with the best of them.
DG: And where does tenkara fit in with purism, do you think?
JG: Well, with some people, it becomes a purist thing where now that’s all they wanna do. With me, it’s another method. I don’t really see it is as better or worse than anything else. It’s like appropriate. You pull up to a stream and you go, “This is tenkara water or no, this is too big. I’m gonna need a reel then.”
DG: Perfect. I thought it was kind of weird pieces. I think I might have highlighted that. One thing that you do in your books that I love pretty much throughout the book and there’s all these brilliant nuggets, you just always have really, really good quotes in them. There is always like I wouldn’t say a bumper sticker but like just a little nice philosophical quote. That’s one of the things that has always been one of my favorite things about your writing I think. It’s that… There’s a conclusion, there’s a moral, something that you draw in almost every paragraph which is pretty amazing.
JG: Well, it’s technique. You figure out what you wanna say and say it once well instead of two or three ways poorly. But I’m just as happy if I can find somebody else who said it beautifully and quote them.
DG: Yeah, yeah. That’s why I’m gonna quote you a lot ’cause you do say things very beautifully I think. Well, I like how you said, “How you decide to fly fish on any given day is one of those rare things that need not concern anyone else. It’s yours alone and the only rule is that if there’s something you love, you should do it as much of it as you can.” And I think that’s interesting ’cause in fly fishing, we do have this thing of people criticizing different styles or being so stuck in a certain way of fly fishing. And as you say, there’s generally no… There’s no better or worst way to do it. And I think that open-mindedness is also what allowed you to try tenkara and allows you to try all these different methods.
JG: Yeah. But by the same token, if somebody decides, “I’m only gonna fish with a tenkara rod or I’m only ever gonna fish dry flies,” there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do that. We just do this for fun and people should do it however they want. I finally just got totally bored with all the… Nymph fishing isn’t really fly fishing. Well sure it is. Do it with a fly rod and it’s legal. It’s fly fishing. Lee Wulff and those guys back in the ’50s and ’60s were catching big Atlantic salmon on 4-weight bamboo rods but fine but why?
DG: Actually, just a question in general, I guess one of the things that I see that I try to create with tenkara was just something that would show people how simple fly fishing can be. It can be just like… It doesn’t have to be this complicated thing that in the way I perceived the industry is trying to be making and the media in general too. It’s like I think a lot of fly fisherman, fly fishing authors too, they try to make this thing seem to be out of reach maybe to put themselves up or just because they do experiment so much and try so many things. Do you think fly fishing has become way more complicated than it needs to be over the last few decades that you fly fished?
JG: Well, that’s a hard call. It has gotten more complicated in the sense that there are lots more flies and lots more rods and lots more lines and lines especially, super specialized lines. You can buy a line for every species under every condition. And I think some of the complications are business driven. If you fish… You can even fish 20 times a year, buy a good fly line that’ll last you for 10 years especially if you clean it, but if you can convince that same guy that he needs nine different lines, we can sell him eight more lines. So I think part of it is that and I think part of it is sort of business driven in writing. There’s a lot of how to writing and so you got to find something new to write about. And I remember once, years and years ago, an editor said to me, “Well, we need something new.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know. The fly has been invented, the rod has been invented, the canoe exists, what do you want? What do you mean new?” So there’s always that pressure. But then at the same time, fly tyers, rod makers, all those guys are just inventive thinkers and always trying to figure out a way to do it better. And every once in a while somebody does.
DG: And I think you had quite a figurative story about… It’s human nature I think to… When you find simplicity in one area of your life, you inevitably kind of…
JG: Yeah. You get all Victorian somewhere else.
DG: Yeah. I like that quote. It’s…
JG: Well, it is human nature. We kind of like our complications, right?
DG: And I was thinking about that too when I run. It’s like, “Okay, so I wonder… The people that are now adopting tenkara, we’ve shown them that this area of their life can be simple. What’s gonna become complicated?”
JG: Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. If your life is too complicated, it is because you have a reel on your fly, right? And god, I’ve talked to people who say, “Yeah, I have 6/10 tenkara rods because I like the simplicity and although it’s great for Daniel but… “
DG: Yeah. One of the messages I try to send, it’s like “Hey, any of our rods will work anywhere but I think people, they think of the rods as candy.” And it’s like… I think there’s this thing about the toys and I guess people are just very drawn to the toys. I’ve always kind of taking more the philosophical thing that things can be much simpler than they look and much less intimidating.
JG: Well, it’s true. You can pare fly fishing down to just almost perfect simplicity. But then every once in a while you go some place where the fish want a certain fly in a certain way and the reverse tackle pulsing tenkara fly doesn’t work. Nothing works all the time. So there’s always that too. You just stumble into these situations where what you know doesn’t work. And so you try to come up with something new. And that’s where a lot of the stuff comes from.
DG: Yeah. And I think the way I look at it, with tenkara, I’m a very strong idealist in certain areas. And I always like to think that really the best way to keep it very simple in a way is to look at how tenkara’s practiced by the… Essentially the masters of tenkara in Japan that are kind of taking their learnings from the original tenkara angler, commercial angler. And so tenkara is originated by this people that were dirt poor that had no fly shop next door to go buy gadgets. They had a bamboo pole they made a line that would’ve been a little hard, made a fly that was as quick to tie as possible, and they caught hundreds of fish because they had to in a way. So I take my… Pretty much all my philosophy driven by that original tenkara angler to the point where I use one fly everywhere, and I try to really learn how to use that fly. But it is one of those things where there’s endless debates and endless ways that we try to improve it and things. Do you think fly fishing can be as simple as I make it out to seem? You can go out with one fly and…
JG: Yes, yeah, sure, I do. The question is, do you want it to be that simple? If you want it to be that simple, it can be. But if you’re like me and you love the complications, then it can be complicated too.
DG: And I think that exactly nails it on the head because it’s… I’m the type of guy… I had been fly fishing for a long time, and I probably complicated things for a period of time. But I think that’s really driven by personality and desires and how we wish it to be because I’m honestly, in my life, there’s too many areas that are complicated or I felt like they were complicated. Fishing was the last one I wanted to be the same. And I also… I always joke when I’m presenting. I’m the type of guy that I go to a restaurant, and I absolutely hate looking at a menu with 30 options in the menu. If I go to a restaurant and it has three options, I’m in heaven. That’s like… And it’s exactly the same thing for fly fishing for me. I just… I don’t like tinkering. I like taking a fly and I know that I can catch fish with that. So I think that does speak well too. We all have different approaches and…
JG: Well, I like both, I like both. I’ve been tying flies for probably four years, and I enjoy it. And I have flies that I really like, and I’d go insane if I had to fish with one fly. And what? You tied five flies in the spring and fishing all summer and you know, that’d drive me insane. What would I do with all my fly tying material, all my tools and stuff?
DG: Yeah. One of my teachers in Japan, he never looks at the flies that he’s picking while he’s fishing, Dr. Ishigaki. Pretty much most of his flies are identical, but he does say that he gets bored of tying exact same flies, so that’s the only reason he ties different flies. And I think fly tying is a hobby on its own. It’s fun. Yeah.
JG: Well, I’m probably a classic example because I go back and forth. I am… When I’m fishing tenkara, I think, “Well this is… I love this simplicity.” And you got everything in your pocket, everything you need in your pocket. And then I’ll go down to the catch and release water on the South Platte and change flies 32 times trying to catch this one fish. And I like them both.
DG: Thanks for listening to the Tenkara Cast. I really hope you enjoyed this interview with John Gierach, and that you’ve been enjoying the episodes that we are putting out there, trying to bring some good content for you to listen to on your drives to your favorite fishing spots or on your way to work or during work if you need something to distract you a little bit from your daily tasks. This song was “Light The Flame” by Takenobu. I’d like to thank him for letting us continue using his music for all of our videos and podcast episodes. I really enjoy the music that he puts out, and I’ve heard that he’s got a new album coming up. So that’s gonna be exciting, can’t wait. If you have any ideas for things that you’d like for us to cover on the podcast, do share online with us, send us an email, leave a note on Facebook or on our website tenkarausa.com/podcast. And until next time with the Tenkara Cast.
Kept hearing cats meows and thought it was one of my 4 cats meowing to get into my office. Kept opening the door and no cat there. Must be meowing cats in the podcast. Fun interview.
Enjoyed watching the original interview/video when it became available online. Just got done listening to the Podcast version and really enjoyed hearing the thoughts/wisdom of the finest fly fishing writer, Mr. John Gierach. I’ve been following him for over twenty years, have all of his fishing book, two of his books of poetry and one audio cassette narrated by him. John is by far, my favorite fly fishing author/celebrity.
That said, I also really enjoy watching Tenkara USA videos with Daniel Galhardo and learning more about Tenkara fishing, kebari, and Japanese culture. While the first printed article I had read was in John Gierach’s book, All Fisherman Are Liars, it was Daniel’s Galhardo’s easy going persona and obvious passion for Tenkara, that got me hooked. To date, I own 10 Tenkara rods, half of which are from Tenkara USA.
Great interview! He seems like an awesome guy to hang out with. John was wondering how many long time fly fisherman would take up Tenkara and fish it exclusively. Well, count me as one. Thanks for the podcast Daniel, keep them coming!
Thanks Dave! More episodes lined up already
I appreciate you taking the time to comment!