back to the future - bamboo diaries #4

It's surprising sometimes, how quickly you can get used to something. I've been  trying out bamboo and horsehair tenkara for only a short time now, and already it's feeling ..well.. natural, I guess. Yes the rod is heavier than my modern  tenkara rods and the casting stroke is different for horsehair line, but I'm discovering that I can do pretty much the same things with this set up as I can with my other rods. 

Today I'm fishing with Karel Lansky. Karel is picking pockets impressively with his Diawa Sagiri, a wonderfully lightweight sieryu rod that casts like a dream.  He's racking up a very healthy tally of fish captures as we leapfrog up the river. At first I'm struggling to keep up. It's not a competition, but I've set myself the challenge of trying to match Karel's success rate with my 'rustic' shorter 10ft rod and line. 

It's an interesting contrast. Karel's Sagiri is the epitome of a modern 'sport' rod, beautifully balanced, refined and responsive. My Wazao rod would be considered these things too, if you were to travel back a couple of hundred years. And that's what I love about my rod - it just feels authentic and true  to its heritage. An efficient fish catching tool, no more, no less. I can't bring myself to put a synthetic casting line on it, for me it asks to be fished with horsehair, and in a short space of time this has all begun to feel quite normal. How far I've travelled becomes apparent when a try with Karel's Sagiri pulls me back to the future.     

   

I happy though, to get my bamboo back, and I'm now settling into the groove, the fish are coming, my casting is improving and I'm enjoying the challenge of targeting ever smaller pockets and ever more subtle flow mosaics to search out the fish. We both catch with surface and subsurface presentations as we move upstream, and some nice fish come for both Karel and myself. We finish up with pretty much identical fish tallies - around twenty five fish to hand each with both of us each having a further dozen or so trout hitting the fly but not sticking. 

For me, tenkara is seldom a numbers game in itself, but today has been an interesting experiment and a good confidence booster on my new path. I've greatly enjoyed meeting and fishing with Karel for the first time, and learning from my observation of his approach to the river. A really good road trip and the bamboo bug is biting ever deeper. Happy days!