Outdoors
Getting Into Tenkara
A small rod, a quiet river, and a hobby I didn’t expect to get hooked on.
Introduction
Recently I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Tenkara fishing.
It started pretty innocently. I was spending too much time inside, watching fishing videos, old episodes of shows like River Monsters, and eventually that familiar itch showed up.
At some point watching stops being enough.
You want to try it yourself.
The appeal of the pursuit
What surprised me is that I wasn’t really chasing big fish.
I wasn’t dreaming about some giant catch or a trophy photo.
What interested me more was the process.
Planning where to go.
Thinking about presentation.
Trying a technique and seeing if it actually works.
Even if the outcome is small.
That part of fishing feels strangely similar to building things — a mix of patience, observation, and small adjustments.
Wanting something different
For a long time I was more of a bass kind of fisherman.
Around where I live there are plenty of striped bass, and they’re fun. Heavy gear, strong hits, loud lures.
But lately I wanted something different.
Something quieter.
Less about throwing heavy sinkers and rattling lures into the water and more about subtlety. Slower movements. Paying attention.
That naturally led me toward fly fishing.
Discovering tenkara
I tried getting into traditional fly fishing, and I liked it, but I’ll be honest — it felt a little cumbersome for me at first.
The gear.
The casting distance.
The whole setup.
Maybe that’s something I’ll grow into eventually.
But tenkara immediately made sense.
It’s simple.
A compact rod.
A line.
A fly.
That’s it.
It felt approachable without feeling watered down.
The first fish
So I picked up a shorter rod and a few kibari flies and headed to a quieter section of my local river.
Nothing dramatic.
Just a shallow stretch where bluegill, pike minnows, and smaller fish tend to hang out.
After a bit of trial and error, I landed my first bluegill.
Not exactly the legendary trout you picture when thinking about fly fishing.
But honestly, it didn’t matter.
I was hooked.
Falling deeper into it
Since then I’ve slowly been building up a small collection of flies.
Some traditional tenkara ones.
Some western flies that I’ve been experimenting with.
Part of the fun has been figuring out how to make them work with a tenkara setup. Not everything translates perfectly, but enough of it does to keep things interesting.
It’s a small puzzle every time.
Looking ahead
The goal eventually is to take this hobby up into the Sierra.
That feels like the natural next step.
For now though, I’m happy just practicing.
Working on technique.
Trying different flies.
Spending more time outside instead of watching videos about it.
Sometimes a small hobby is enough to reset things a bit.
And tenkara has been doing that for me.