Posts Tagged New York City

Happy (7th) Anniversary

April 10, 2019 at 1:16 am · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Trips ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Happy (7th) Anniversary . . .

 

Ebisu tenkara rod tipped by an Olive Woolly Bugger tied by Urban Angler’s Dennis Feliciano.
(NYC 04 2019)

The best way to celebrate seven (7!) continuous years of tenkara in Manhattan was to fish, photograph, and write all about it.

April, still mostly cold and gray, offers the local season’s most consistent angling for black crappie and the golden shiner, Notemigonus crysoleucas, a hard hitting, fast sprinting fish that in almost every way resembles its European cousin, the Rudd.

My first, and favorite, TUSA Ebisu rod retains it’s fine 5/5 action and good luck. A few overcast afternoon hours spent along the banks of Central Park’s ponds produced the two key species of the season:

Black Crappie

Black Crappie
(NYC 04 2019)

 

Golden Shiner

Golden Shiner
(NYC 04 2019)

 

Tenkara continues to take Manhattan seven years on, and counting.

Happy Anniversary, TTM . . .

— rPs 04 09 2019

 

Postscript: Revisit the first post of TTM by following this link:  https://tenkaratakesmanhattan.com/2012/04/09/hello-world/

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Tie Up Loose Ends

March 27, 2019 at 5:58 pm · Filed under Tenkara Kebari, Tenkara News, Tenkara Reading ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Tie Up Loose Ends . . .

Partridge & Orange, Deer & Orange
(NYC 03 2019)

Trout season in New York state opens April 1st. Time to tie up loose ends and whip finish those kebari fly patterns . . .

 

By Ebisu

Patterns go
In a stream’s flow.

Fishers,
Men and women,

Tie together
As feathers and fur do

When wrapped
By thread and floss;

Their names, embossed,
Become floating sculptures.

 

Optional Author’s Note: Ebisu is the Japanese god of fisherman, good luck, and workingmen, as well as the guardian of small children’s health. He is one of the Seven Gods of Fortune, and the only one of the seven to originate in Japan. This poem, about the legacy of fly tiers and their namesake creations, was composed while sitting by an image of Ebisu, thus the title.

 

— rPs 03 26 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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Cold Solstice Holidays

December 23, 2018 at 8:30 pm · Filed under Tenkara Art, Tenkara News, Tenkara Reading ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Cold Solstice Holidays . . .

December Brook
(NY 12 2018)

Open water remains. Cold, clear, high visibility no match for the fishes obscura.

Was that a trout? Was that a bass? Was it a reflection, of something else, something not even a fish? Daylight flies faster than the fisher.

Retired to the warm indoor, reading and the contemplation of visual art returns to front focus.

Moving Water by Dave Hall

Moving Water

by Dave Hall

hardcover, 50 pp.

Blaine Creek

Dave Hall, an artist of works in oil, has Moving Water give an illustrated meditation, poetry and brushwork combined, in a sublime 10-minutes of illuminated manuscript. Recommended.

Back Seat by Henry Hughes

Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

hardcover, 303 pp.

Skyhorse Publishing

Not to take a back seat, do take a Back Seat with Fish off the shelves and buy it. Don’t miss the opportunity to immerse with an American life lived in America’s northern corners, New York and Oregon, with the fishing haunting happily in its present attendance at all times in between. Recommended.

The Art of Angling and Fishing Stories edited by Henry Hughes

The Art of Angling

edited by Henry Hughes

hardcover, 256 pp.

Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf

The greater corpos (including, yet beyond the canon) gives a broad read in a pair,  stories and poetry, presented in two attractive hardcover collected volumes edited by Dr. Hughes: The Art of Angling and Fishing Stories

Fishing Stories

edited by Henry Hughes

hardcover, 369 pp.

Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf

There are many, many literary angles as there are anglers, men, women, children who all still relish hours reading fish tales and rhymes pictured on the page in a quiet corner on a winter afternoon.

Happy Holidays.

— rPs 12 23 2018

 

 

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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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Summer’s End

September 30, 2018 at 7:45 pm · Filed under Tenkara News, Tenkara Trips ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Summer’s End . . .

 

The Beginning: Rain
(09 2018)

The autumnal equinox brings a change not so much of physical character, not at first, but in the immediate of light, light lost, as an evening falls so quickly, dramatic, perceptible, noticeable, between the beginning, the center, and the end of September.

 

The Beginning

FALLfish: (September Tarpon)
(09 2018)

 

The Center

September Sands (North Atlantic) (09 2018)

September Cocktail
(09 2018)

 

The End

September Bank Foliage
(09 2018)

Big Belly Bluegill
(09 2018)

— rPs 09 30 2018

 

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The White Fly

August 29, 2018 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Tenkara Kebari, Tenkara News ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The White Fly . . .

The White Fly
(imitates the mayfly, genus Ephoron)

The poet, the poetic, part of me has always enjoyed finding a word with my name within it, and being born in August, all things keen to the eighth month of the calendar year attract me.

The insect known as the White Fly to fly fishers, the mayfly of the genus Ephoron, a prime hatch of August, is then right there on my short summer favorites list.

White Fly kebari for tenkara can be tied in a most simple manner. My recipe:

 

Hook: size 10-16, dry fly

Body: 6/0 thread, white

Hackle: Deer belly hair, white

 

The body is sparse, light, and deer belly hair adds bouyancy. Fish the fly on an August evening and catch brown trout, or smallmouth bass, or panfish, even channel catfish will rise to this fly on select clear and cobbled rivers in the American northeast.

The remainder of the time I stay true to the crayfish, and other creatures of the subaqueous realm, with some variant of my Green Guarantee.

The Green Guarantee
(NYC 08 2018)

 

— rPs 08 29 2018

 

Postscript: poetic disclosure; my first stand-alone collection – museum of buildings: poems – was first published twenty (20!) years ago this month . . .

museum of buildings: poems
(first edition, August 1998)

 

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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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Sun Fishing

June 30, 2018 at 12:35 pm · Filed under Tenkara Trips ·Tagged , , , , ,

Sun Fishing . . .

 

Largemouth Bass
(NYC 06 2018)

Summer’s arrival brings long evenings of lingering light, which gives the urban tenkara angler that most inportant of fishing factors: time.

Bluegill
(NYC 06 2018)

Tenkara time well spent. Time fishing for the the sunfishes of summer.

Black Crappie
(NYC 06 2018)

– rPs 06 30 2018

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