All Fishermen Are Liars Page 12
The first time I fished a tenkara rod was in March, during a midge hatch on a small local tailwater. The long, whippy rod and fixed line seemed awkward at first, but I got used to them quickly. The usual repertoire of overhead, sidearm, tuck and pile casts all worked, as well as that flipping aerial roll cast small-stream fishers use and that no one I know has a name for. This was actually the same way I fish pocket water with the usual seven-foot nine-inch or eight-foot rod: making short casts and high-stick drifts with little more than a rod’s length of line. The only difference was that with a thirteen-foot rod, a short cast was noticeably longer and I could hold more line off the water for a better, longer drift.
Playing and landing small fish was the kind of thing you’d work out on your own even if you hadn’t been told how to do it. You fight the fish against the bend of the rod, and when it’s played out, you lift the rod until you can reach the line, hold the line against the rod with one hand and run the other hand down to your trout. Some tenkara fishermen carry a small, round landing net with an offset handle called a tamo. Nine times out of ten, it’s not necessary, but when it is necessary, you’re real glad to have it.
It’s been said that anyone can learn to fish adequately with a tenkara rod in a few hours, and that may not be an exaggeration. These things are recognizable fly rods, and the more you know about fly fishing in general and tenkara specifically, the more you can get out of them, but they still bear a vague family resemblance to a cane pole and string and are therefore something a seven-year-old could master instinctively. In fact, Daniel said he sells a fair number of rods to hikers and backpackers who aren’t exactly dedicated fly fishermen but who like the idea of a complete fishing outfit that packs down small and only weighs a few ounces.
He’s also careful to point out that tenkara rods are intended specifically for small water and fish not much more than a foot long, so I wasn’t sure that tailwater would be entirely tenkara-friendly. It was a little too wide to be called a small stream and although the average trout is around ten or twelve inches long, you could easily hook a bigger fish. But as it turned out, the water was still low in March, the wading was easy, and with a little more than twenty-six feet of rod and line, there weren’t many places I couldn’t reach. I also didn’t hook a trout longer than ten inches on that first day.
There was another unforeseen advantage. This was a cold, humid day at an elevation of around 8,000 feet, and as we strung up our rods at the car, my friend Vince said, “I hope my line doesn’t freeze in the guides.” I held up the long rod with no guides and said, “No worries here.”
It was only a week or so later on the same river that I did hook a fish I couldn’t land. It was a rainbow I’ll guess at around seventeen inches and when it made a strong run, I instinctively pointed the rod at him to give him line, remembering too late that I didn’t have any more line to give. (Apparently there’s no tenkara equivalent to the screaming reel.) Of course, with the rod pointed straight at the fish, he came up tight, neatly snapped off the fly, and kept going. I’ve lost countless fish over the years and none of them were the end of the world, although they all felt like it at the time. This isn’t the old cliché about the big one getting away; it’s just that the one that does get away is suddenly the one you really wanted.
Sometime later Ed explained that you should keep your rod up even on a heavy fish, and that this wasn’t just a case of horse ’em and hope for the best. Between the flex of the long, light rod, a little stretch in the braided line, and the cushion of your own wrist and elbow, you can actually lay into a bigger trout much harder than you think. Also, a fish can only go in the direction he’s pointed, and the reach of the long rod lets you deflect a run and steer the fish into slack water. It does take practice but finally boils down to a little knowledge of fish behavior, a feel for the capabilities of the tackle and the accurate snap judgment. You can still hook a fish you can’t land, but once you know how to use the rod, that fish gets considerably larger.
Daniel suggests using only light leaders because it is possible to break these long, delicate rods (he markets replacement sections), but of course not everyone follows his advice. He said he’s heard from customers who claim to have landed unusually large fish on tenkara rods: twenty-inch trout, small steelhead, some bonefish and a largemouth bass weighing eight pounds. He seemed to have mixed feelings about that, but when his wife landed her own twenty-inch rainbow on a tenkara rod, he was eager to show me the photos.
As it turned out, Ed and I had stumbled on tenkara independently, which was no surprise to me. We’ve known each other for something like thirty-five years and share, among other things, a long-running interest in traditional Japanese art, poetry and philosophy that dates back to our counterculture days in the 1970s. (This year we coincidentally sent each other the same Christmas card featuring a winter scene by Japanese woodblock artist Kawase Hasui.) It was only natural that with something like this in the air, we’d have both caught the same scent. It was also just like Ed to have worked out some things that I’d missed.
I fished tenkara rods off and on through the season, taking plenty of time off for bigger water and bigger fish where I wanted a longer cast and a reel with backing and a good drag. Switching back and forth became seamless. Like any specialized tackle, a tenkara rod is versatile and efficient in the range of conditions it was intended for, but it becomes less so as you deviate from the ideal until eventually its advantages become frustrations and you feel like breaking the thing over your knee.
I was surprised at how quickly I absorbed the novelty of tenkara and ended up just fishing. Early on, I’d sometimes giggle out loud at the long reach I had and the beautiful drifts I was getting in normally difficult pocket water, but then I just got used to it. Playing and landing most of the trout I hooked was straightforward enough, and now and then I’d get one that provided the kind of drama that keeps you fishing. I’m not sure I caught any more fish than usual with the tenkara rod, but on the right kind of water I was more likely to do it with that elusive smoothness we all strive for.
By the time Daniel came out to fish in August, I thought I’d become a reasonably adept tenkara fisherman. I’d learned to cast in fairly tight quarters, to keep my fly out of the trees (usually) and to play and land fish deftly. I’d also picked up the neat trick of collapsing the rod and coiling the line around my hand to bushwhack through thick bankside brush, which alone is worth the price of admission. I’d lost a few fish, but I couldn’t blame any of them on the tackle. I’d also landed trout up to fifteen inches in fast current and had watched Ed bring in a sixteen-inch splake. It turned out that hooking a fish on a tenkara rod was a surprisingly businesslike procedure. You’d either land the fish or lose it, but either way it would happen quickly.
I’d even prepared a succinct explanation about this strange rod I was using for fishermen who were curious, but oddly, no one ever asked.
I’d been fishing the usual sparse selection of flies in my small-stream box on an upstream or across-stream dead drift—usually a single dry fly, sometimes with a nymph dropper. I’d also done well a few times fishing a wet fly on a short down and across-current swing and dredging shallow pockets with a brace of nymphs. In other words, I was fishing the way I always fished, only with slightly different tackle.
Daniel said he also started out with his old favorite patterns, but after a second trip to Japan, he switched to tenkara flies. These are the simplest imaginable patterns, often just a thread or floss body with a reversed hackle that flares forward over the eye of the hook. A few of these patterns have a flash of color, but most are drab and plain as dirt. What Daniel calls a “pure tenkara fisherman” is a total presentationist and may do all his fishing with a single one of these patterns, carrying two or three identical spares of the same size in a small glass vial with a cork stopper and fishing them dry or wet as needed.
Tenkara flies are traditionally fished on a more or les
s tight line with a series of subtle swings, skitters and gently pulsing lifts and drops, always keeping in mind that whatever slight motion you make with your rod hand is multiplied by as much as fourteen feet of rod. (It sounds and even looks easy, but the easy part is to overdo it.) In the water the fly looks very much like an insect struggling weakly toward the surface, while the flaring of the reversed soft hackle does a good impression of a breaststroke. The overall effect is convincingly lifelike, and one afternoon I watched Daniel tease up any number of trout on the kind of catch-and-release tailwater where anything but a dead drift is considered to be heresy.
The long rod gives you lots of reach, but there are still times when you need to employ some stealth. There can be lots of crouching and kneeling, and Daniel favors a brand of wader that comes with built-in kneepads. For all its simplicity, the traditional tenkara strategy has an air of impatience. Rather than compulsively changing patterns looking for the right one, you give each fish a shot at biting your one fly, and if it doesn’t, you shrug and move on with a distinctly non-American acceptance of the fact that you can’t catch them all.
I never did become a pure tenkara fisherman because it didn’t seem necessary. There are days when I enjoy the refreshing lack of clutter the method provides, but then there are other days when I find great comfort in the old familiar clutter that has taken me a lifetime to accumulate. In the end, I’ve come to think of tenkara less as a style of fly fishing and more as a useful thought experiment in which you ask not, How much do I need? but, How little can I get away with?
And along those same lines, there’s the obvious paradox that in the ongoing search for a kind of blissful simplicity, I’ve gone ahead and gotten myself yet another fly rod.
14
KODIAK
Every location on earth has its unique morning sounds. Just before dawn on Uyak Bay on the west coast of Kodiak Island, it’s the steady breathing of the surf, a single muffled splash that could be a salmon or maybe a sea otter, the first few herring gulls beginning to wake up, and faintly, from far off across the bay, something that doesn’t really sound like elephants trumpeting, but that’s the closest comparison I can come up with.
I go back inside the lodge, pour a second cup of coffee and ask John Pearce, the camp manager, what it might be. He says, pleasantly, “I have no idea” while making a visible effort to keep from rolling his eyes. John has been in the sport fishing business for a long time and would have said that by now he’d heard it all, but elephants in Alaska? Jeez!
A few minutes later when the owner, Bruce Kososki, comes in, I ask him the same question. With the coffeepot in one hand and a cup in the other, he frowns for a moment, then brightens and says, “Oh, it must be sea lions.” Of course, sea lions. I give John a triumphant look, which he ignores, and another day of fishing begins.
At about this time the day before, the predawn sounds included muffled crowd noise, recorded announcements and unidentified electronic beeping at the Anchorage airport. This could have been any airport in any city except that businessmen wearing ties and carrying computers were far outnumbered by rougher-looking customers with cased rifles or fishing rods. It wasn’t always clear who was coming and who was going except for two men, each with a week’s growth of stubble, who were checking enormous moose antlers at the oversized baggage-counter.
I’d flown in from Denver and was on my way to catch the Era Aviation flight out to the town of Kodiak on Kodiak Island. Once we were in the air, the man across the aisle from me got out an expensive-looking, disk-drag fly reel and proceeded to tie on a fresh leader. He looked over and gave me a maniacal grin, which I answered with a thumbs-up. We were two strangers going fishing, and although our respective trips could still go either way, just being in Alaska meant we had upped the ante.
In Kodiak, I walked across the wet parking lot to Island Air Service for the hop across the island to Larsen Bay with its dirt airstrip, Russian Orthodox church complete with an onion-shaped steeple, and thirty-nine year-round residents. Then there was a van ride to the lodge, where I changed into waders, took another short van ride down to the harbor and climbed aboard a lovely 1957 de Havilland Beaver floatplane. We were headed to the source of the Dog Salmon River at Frazer Lake, where I would finally get down to business.
At the lake we strung up 6-weight rods and hiked downstream, talking loudly to let any bears that were around know we were coming. Bears don’t like surprises. Nine times out of ten they’ll just run away when they’re startled, but it’s that tenth time you’re hoping to avoid. For emergencies, the two fly-fishing guides, Chuck Mercer and Trent Deeter, were each armed with 12-gauge pump shotguns loaded with rifled slugs. Our pilot, Jay Wattum, was carrying a lever-action .45-70 carbine done up for the wet climate in stainless steel with fiberglass stocks. (A tourist brochure on safety in Kodiak bear country warns that the usual .44-magnum hog leg “may not be adequate.”) These riot guns were comforting in a way, but you understand that they’re a last resort that you’ll go to great lengths not to depend on. We Americans can feel naïvely safe when we’re packing firearms, but honestly, few of us have either the skill or the nerve to calmly take down a charging bear at a range of twenty-five yards.
We were there for the rainbows and Dolly Vardens that were following the spawning sockeye salmon to feed on their dribbled and dislodged eggs. By then the sockeye run was nearing its end, but that hardly mattered. The rainbows and Dollys had been gorging on eggs from one salmon run or another for most of the summer and were hard-wired to pick up anything small, orange and egglike drifting in the current. That would include our plastic beads rigged slightly ahead of size 10 barbless hooks and slightly behind a single small split shot. There are those who wouldn’t consider this a proper fly and in another context I might agree, but Alaskan fly fishers tend to bypass fine points of style in favor of practicality, and the attitude is contagious.
This wasn’t the main event for anyone. I’d come in mid-September hoping for silver salmon, the one species of Pacific salmon I’d never caught. Dick Matzke and his two sons, who were also staying at the lodge, had come to winch halibut out of three hundred feet of salt water and shoot Sitka blacktail deer. This side trip was just the kind of harmless showmanship some lodges like to engage in on the first day. By the time most of us have finally gotten where we wanted to be in Alaska, we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time schlepping from one airplane to the next without a decent meal or much more than a catnap. Enthusiasm can still trump exhaustion, but at this point it’s a toss-up and catching a whole bunch of beautiful fish without much effort is the surest way to tip the collective mood into positive territory.
After lunch we hiked back to the plane for the short flight down to the mouth of the river to look for silver salmon. (Rivers that rise on islands aren’t long because they don’t have room to be. No place on Kodiak is more than fifteen miles from the sea.) After we’d banked downriver and over the tidal flat where the Dog entered a small bay, Jay asked over the intercom, “Did you see all the silvers in those first two pools?”
“No,” I replied, “I was watching the bear.”
“Yeah, the bear’s a good sign,” he said. “He’s lookin’ for salmon just like we are.”
By the time I’d spotted this big adult, he was already trotting away from the racket of the plane. His brown fur rippled like silk in the thin sunlight, and as he glanced at us over his shoulder, he looked more annoyed than scared.
Jay beached the plane at the edge of an alluvial fan several hundred yards from shore, checked the tide chart and announced that we had to be back by four-twenty. Otherwise the outgoing tide would strand us there until tomorrow.
“Can you remember that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t have a watch.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “Somebody’ll have one.”
In the days to come, I’d learn that “That’s cool” was Ja
y’s automatic response to just about everything. Like some other bush pilots I’d met, Jay could seem like a wing nut on the ground—all bluster and bad jokes—but it was either an act for the benefit of tourists or some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing because in the air he was all business and there was no one you’d rather have at the controls.
We waded ashore and Chuck checked me out at the top of the second long pool. He said most of the fish would be lying in the deeper current near the far bank about a fifty-foot cast away. He pointed and on cue a large salmon rolled. “Cast down and across, give the fly a minute to sink and strip it back in short jerks,” he said.
On my third cast the fly stopped as if it had been slammed in a door and the fish ran downstream and then back up with startling speed, making porpoising jumps and rapping my knuckles with the reel handle. There was the usual moment of panic. The fish seemed too big. The 8-weight rod seemed too small. A few minutes later I had my first silver salmon on the beach: a twelve-pound buck, thick and deep with a grotesquely undershot kype that was the very face of grim determination. He was still within sight of salt water, but already his silver flanks were beginning to flush pink. I’d come on this trip hoping to see a Kodiak bear and catch a silver salmon, and both had happened in the space of twenty minutes. It seemed almost too easy.
The next fish was a chrome-bright female of about ten pounds that had a more troutlike face and fought no less ferociously for being two pounds lighter. There were some others after that and then everyone was reeling in and wading back out toward the plane. I had no idea what time it was, but there was no outgoing current on the flat, so we’d beaten the tide and wouldn’t have to spend the night. I glanced over my shoulder for the charging bear my imagination had been concocting all afternoon, but there was nothing but beach grass and driftwood.