Archive for Tenkara Philosophy

End of July Fluke

July 31, 2019 at 9:40 am · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Techniques ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

End of July Fluke . . .

 

Proper Beach Fluke Release
(07 2019)

The find for a good start: an empty stretch of beach, early, sun behind, near a narrow point connecting back bay with channel, sand underfoot. It’s summer.

The small tungsten bucktail kebari with perhaps an especially long saddle feather may be swung off a line of fifteen to twenty feet in combined length. The tide incoming or outgoing swings the pattern on a current like a trout stream seam within the greater bay. Sometimes a striper, also short,  intercedes, but this season is ruled by the summer flounder.

Fluke Kandy
(NYC 07n2019)

Another summer morning, another sudden solid connection with a fluke on the swing.

A Beauty By the Jetty
(07 2019)

The left-eyed flatfish, the summer flounder, fluke, is game for fly patterns. The black crappie of the sea, perhaps, to my personal perception of parallel connection. The southpaw fluke stands as a visual stealth and surge predator that seeks smaller fish.

Width adds weight to the battle after the connection is made and a demonstrative tenkara rod hookset sets with success. Nothing else quite feels like a flounder on the end of a line: the uppercut take, the fluttering stand-off, the evasions the fish’s nearly two-dimensional form can achieve.

Shorts are the rule. True. Catch and release is not only fun saltwater panfishing; it’s the law. So many fluke caught are just below the legal length that one must assume keepers are in fact almost always kept.

I release all, with the option open to keep.

Path to Fluke Point
(07 2019l)

 

— rPs 07 31 2019

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4th of July Fireworks

July 4, 2019 at 8:48 pm · Filed under Tenkara Art, Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Reading ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

4th of July Fireworks. . .

 

How the Fireworks Started
(NYC 07 04 2019)

(* Excerpt from Small Fry: The Lure of the Little by ron P. swegman. 2009. The Whitefish Press.)

 

Fireworks!

 

Happy Fourth of July.

— rPs 07 04 2019

 

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Earth Day 49

April 22, 2019 at 2:50 pm · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Reading ·Tagged , , , , ,

Earth Day 49 . . .

 

The author of Philadelphia on the Fly celebrates Earth Day “by the book” . . .
(Planet Earth 04 22 2019)

Earth Day has reached the cusp of a human’s middle age. The planet remains older, larger, and more important than all of us people put together. Let us try, at least try, to be stewards and gardeners and protectors rather than mere users of our one and only green, white, and blue home.

 

— rPs 04 22 2019

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Icing on the Lake

February 28, 2019 at 4:09 am · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Trips ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Icing on the Lake . . .

 

Open Water = Hope
(NYC)

Punxsutawney Phil predicted on February 2nd an early spring. He has been correct but for two spells of clear, cold artic gale.

 

The ice left behind the windswept spells retreats by half after just a day or two warm enough to compell the morning doves to coo.

 

One can walk the pond’s bank, hear garrulous bluejay’s, and the polite tufted titmouse can be seen in the park’s bare deciduous trees. A streamer shuffled across the ice until it drops with a wake into open water can at this time of year lead to a large largemouth on the line.

Winter Bass
(NYC)

Black Crappie, too, the icing on the lake.

Crappie in the Cold
(NYC)

Thanks, Phil.

 

— rPs 02 27 2019

 

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The Winter Vice

January 29, 2019 at 11:48 pm · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Trips ·Tagged , , ,

The Winter Vice . . .

A Fly Tying Vise In Winter
(NYC 01 2019)

To tie the artificial fly is a proper way to spend fishing time when winter water runs under ice. Still water, too, so still as to be stiff, under ice. Time to read and write and tie the fly.

Why yes.

When winter warms, by whatever reason, the result is a new, almost opposite, reality: time when fly tying can be viewed as a vice, a vice practiced at the vise when you could instead get up and out and fish a rare treat — open water in winter.

Open Water In Winter
(NYC)

 

EARLY Season Largemouth Bass
(NYC,)

Winter water with active fish = tenkara happiness

— rPs 01 29 2019

 

 

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The Brown Belt

November 30, 2018 at 9:18 pm · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy ·Tagged , , , , , ,

The Brown Belt

 

November: Stream Banks Bare But For Nuts

The brown belt of tenkara fly fishing seen in the riparian gone to seed, felt in the waders in the cold, in the damp, in the brief days of November. To earn it is to do it. The reward, layered as most good things are, is that the fish, though scattered, sporadic, remain strong, with a few willing to strike a kebari worked perhaps at a slower pace than in spring or summer.

 

November Fallfish

The sound of the moving water holds tight to a higher presence on a stream lined by trees bare but for nuts and a few aged leaves faded like worn pennants.

 

Swans, Lake
(NYC 11 2018)

The pond as well has weathered the autumnal transition, and with the leaf hatch over, the fallen herded into a few corner spots, open waters rippled by wind look dark chocolate. Tannin depth nurtured by the afternoon switch from light to night, brief, almost beyond belief.

 

Largemouth Bass
(NYC 11 2018)

The reward, to repeat, the reward is that the fish, though scattered, sporadic, remain strong, with a few willing to strike a kebari worked perhaps at a slower pace than in spring or summer.

— rPs 11 30 2018

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Shore and Stream

July 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm · Filed under Tenkara Art, Tenkara News, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Trips ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Shore and Stream . . .

 

Shore
(07 2018)

Photos are worth.

 

There is a Facebook user’s group named “Tenkara Where?” where one can see angling destinations speak for themselves in the thousand words of a single photograph.

 

So, then, so shall July be documented at TTM, not by pics of patterns or fish in grip, rather portraits of place, places angled in July 2018.

 

Stream
(07 2018)

— rPs 07 31 2018

 

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Lefty’s Rod

April 28, 2018 at 3:19 am · Filed under Tenkara Art, Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Reading ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Lefty’s Rod . . .

The TFO BVK: acquired in memoriam of Bernard Victor Kreh
(NYC 04 2018)

 

April is National Poetry Month.

 

* Poetry CORNER *

 

 

April at the Bluejays

 

Mist belts all of the towers

At the waist,

Zipped locked lid not of lead, but of white,

Enlightened.

Wind winded rests, sets in sky unscraped stillness,

All is could,

Not even the scat siren extremes sing, no,

Jazzbulance,

Do within such mists near trees are hung lamps,

Enlightened,

More or less to describe the vibe, window open,

Spring blessed,

The rest no rest beyond brief evenings in nest,

Relaxed crest;

We let the robins sing all the evening,

We give the morning to all of the doves.

 

 

* Poetry CORNER *

Along the Flow
(04 2018)

Along the flow,
With Lefty’s rod,
And by Ebisu.
Tenkara is, too,
Verses not vs. ,
Knew and new.
— rPs 04 27 2018

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The Aliving I Do

January 29, 2018 at 7:38 pm · Filed under Tenkara Kebari, Tenkara Philosophy ·Tagged , , , , , ,

The Aliving I Do . . .

20180129_134009

Hook to Hand: In Memoriam. (NYC 01 2018)

Winter, short days of natural light, on one a free hour to daydream over flies tied and once and for one tethered to a memorable fish brought to hand.

Retired, rowed under the white January light, the patterns, kebari alined in the Flybrary convey a line of gravestones, hand-to battles with individual fish, now in memory, ending well.

Two books in print gives one imagery of grace enough to give away, for a time, useful insight.

Writing, the noun, one encounters antecedents where Albert Camus traces the artist at work, or an artist, Gertrude Stein, who to the end collaged grammar and vocabulary into grand reads.

My first book in hand, dimensions of a collection of poetry. Oh, I forgot to mention in the preface:

“Start steady and seek the click rhythm worked into the prose and the cadence will carry you, ceate one of those satisfying read-in-one-extended-sitting kind of poetic books that Poe, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kawabata, Camus, and Hesse have delivered.”

My book, at last, delivered and signed for at the cornershop on a July afternoon, picked up by me and back out on the sidewalk I raised copy #1 above the view of the leafy neighboorhood treeline in light sunny yellow and warm: I saw, I witnessed the punctuation mark to a project. I had completed some thing, words separated on purpose, as the thing itself seemed huge, philosophical, existential.

Book in hand, solid rectangle of heavy paper, cultivated, communicated a similar slab: the gravestone.

Yes, books, books you yourself author, are gravestones. Here lies, truths, of an atc lived within the intervals of your creative life.

Insight.

Yes, it is in the living, at times fishing, and in others kindred, in the documenting of the living in writing and at times select image, rendered, that drives the alive, the aliving I do.

Gertrude Stein, born in West Allegheny, PA, resided in Paris for a majority of her creative life; she wrote a lot.
(NYC 01 2018)

A New Year. 2018

— rPs 01 30 2018

 

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Blue Trout

September 29, 2017 at 8:11 pm · Filed under Tenkara Philosophy, Tenkara Techniques ·Tagged , , , , ,

Blue Trout . . .

Bluefish, Pomatomus saltatrix
(09 2017)

Temperatures have held high in humidity after a cool valley where August met September. Days have become shorter of light.

The seas have been swollen, due to the newsworthy vortices from the south and east. The view is broad, dynamic waves, bass from the raw power of waves that tackle rather than slap.

Time for albies, but before the linesiders, the bigger striped bass of autumn, both fish far too much for tenkara designed for trout. There is from the same jetties some times of clear sky and slack tide in September when the cocktail, quite the snapper in tooth, makes itself vulnerable enough, as in close enough, for successful multiple cast-hook-catch landings in the net.

Number Two Fish, Bluefish
(09 2017)

Tenkara in the salt remains an experiment rewarded. Bluefish of this size fight, the manic headshake like a trout of twenty inches, a trout with teeth. Most small Clouser or Charlie type patterns will lure fish. To land fish, your own skill at the cast in coastal breeze, and in arm wrestling with fish, is up to you.

Silver lining; the view:

Blued View: Bluefish Weather
(9 2017)

 

— rPs 09 29 2017

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