You can approach the river with technique. Or you can approach with an open heart and a conscience. Or both. But to achieve this, a balance must be struck. This can be the work of an angler's lifetime. This my father taught me.
There is plenty of encouragement to adopt approaches tuned to catch the most fish - methods validated by competition anglers, so they must be good, must be the best. And tenkara can certainly lend itself to this mentality if you want it to. But just who is this competition with? Is it with ourselves? Is it with our friends? Is it with the fish - or nature itself? This worries me. After all, the restless human quest to take ever more from the natural world has not brought us to a happy place.
I know anglers who strive to emulate competition techniques for catching fish. Fifty fish sessions. As if that is all there is to fishing. I feel sorry for them. And what comes next? Sixty fish days? Seventy, a hundred? Days are measured out only by the fish body-count.…
There is plenty of encouragement to adopt approaches tuned to catch the most fish - methods validated by competition anglers, so they must be good, must be the best. And tenkara can certainly lend itself to this mentality if you want it to. But just who is this competition with? Is it with ourselves? Is it with our friends? Is it with the fish - or nature itself? This worries me. After all, the restless human quest to take ever more from the natural world has not brought us to a happy place.
I know anglers who strive to emulate competition techniques for catching fish. Fifty fish sessions. As if that is all there is to fishing. I feel sorry for them. And what comes next? Sixty fish days? Seventy, a hundred? Days are measured out only by the fish body-count.…