How to Find and Explore New Fishing Waters

0:00This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, the podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast, I'll be sharing information with you on techniques, history, gear and philosophies, as well as Tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing Tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It is only possible we create content such as this podcast and all the videos that we create because of your support. So we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA rods, lines, and flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about the simple Japanese method of fly fishing, Tenkara. Welcome back to another episode of the Tenkara Cast, the relaunched edition. My name is Daniel Galhardo. I'm the host and founder of Tenkara USA. And today's topic is going to be finding waters, you know, where you can find waters to fly fishing these times that we are all looking for social distancing.

1:04But before I get into that topic, I want to thank each and every one of you for helping us. Like any small business around the country right now, we are facing unprecedented times, times of uncertainty. You know, we don't know exactly what's going to happen even tomorrow. Things have been changing kind of fast. And we were put in a situation where we prepared for a great spring season of sales. We stocked up on inventory. We manufactured a lot of rods and other products in anticipation of a really good sales season. And like any fishing business, we kind of go a little dormant throughout the winter, and we kind of look forward to sales picking up. And we made all that investment and all of a sudden, boom, you know, we're hit with what's happening around us. And I put out a statement yesterday and I also asked for a little bit of help. You know, we didn't ask for donations or anything like that. That's not what we need. We just wanted to sell some rods, give you a good deal.

2:07And we just asked you, you know, if you were keeping an eye on a Tenkara rod or had a friend who might be interested in learning how to fly fish right now for you to spread the word. and you have come through and through for us. I'm incredibly grateful. I was extremely anxious last week because one of the facilities that we work with, which does the receiving and packaging for us, they were closed with a one-day notice. So we have, you know, some product got stuck there, and it's okay. But that place was also our contingency plan. I've always kind of planned to have inventory in a couple of different locations in case of disruptions. That place in California closed, and that was our contingency plan. And all of a sudden, we start seeing around the country things moving really, really fast. And I started getting a little anxious about what if our main fulfillment center, you know, we outsource that portion to another company. And they recently moved their warehouse to Dallas in Texas.

3:10And what if they were to shut doors, you know, with a day's notice? We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. So before anything happened, you know, just to kind of be able to pay our employees, be able to pay our bills, we just wanted to move some inventory. And we've been seeing the numbers really come through. It gives us a lot of room to breathe. And I'm incredibly grateful on behalf of the whole staff at Tenkara USA because, you know, who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. We hope nothing. We hope things get better really quickly. But really appreciate the help that you've been giving us and very grateful. And we hope to be there with you for the long term. You know, we're all in this together and we don't want to stop doing the good that we do right now because of this. So thanks so much for purchasing the rod, telling your friend about it. We still have the sale going on. It's a 30% discount on the rod if you haven't seen it yet. So any of our Tenkara Yosei rods and we're throwing in a free hat with every order.

4:11We're just putting that in the box at the warehouse. But that's it. That's mostly I'm grateful for that. But today I don't want to focus on the COVID messaging. I don't want to tell you much more about it. We're all kind of stressed. We're all facing these times together. What I'd like to do today is get you some tools that, at least one tool here, that might be helpful in your phishing. So right now we're trying to socially distance, but we're also being asked not to travel. We're also being asked not to go to perhaps our favorite river that might be three, four hours away. We are asked to be staying close to home. But the outdoors is an incredibly healing thing for all of us. We take a lot of comfort in spending time, whether it's in the trees, in the field, in the bush, and of course in a stream.

5:12So luckily we're not being asked at this point to stop fishing. Even though some locations, rightfully so in my opinion, have closed, we still have a lot of options. Most of us do anyways, fortunately, have some options for places to go fishing. And what I think this is, is a great opportunity for us to find new waters, explore waters that maybe we have overlooked so far. And that's kind of what I want to talk to you about today. Today I want to talk about finding waters. Because oftentimes we kind of, like myself, you know, I might fall into a routine and for a period of time I just start going to the same stream a little bit more frequently. Oftentimes, they're not the streams really close to my home because I either fish those enough or maybe I overlook those. And when I talk about streams, I should talk about waters. Sometimes we overlook the ponds close to home or the canals.

6:14The irrigation ditch is close to home and so forth. and in my experience in the past sometimes you know like I've had the the pond that I overlooked unless conditions are blown out everywhere I've also had this you know the the times that maybe I was fishing my local water very frequently and all of a sudden I started feeling like man I'm just kind of fishing for my neighbors you know I'm trying to catch neighbors here and that's not what I want to do you know I don't need to be catching the fish out of the stream that is close to my home all the time. So I kind of took breaks from fishing certain waters, mostly to kind of, you know, change the scenery and that kind of thing. But right now, you know, we're staying close to home. So let's talk a little bit about that. And first of all, I want to point out a great resource that was put together a few years ago. The first issue of the Tenkara magazine, We had an article by Steve Schweitzer.

7:16He's the author of the Fly Fishing Guide to Indian Peaks Wilderness, and he's also the author of Fly Fishing Guide to Rocky Mountain National Park. Rocky Mountain National Park right now is closed, by the way. But he wrote a great article for the magazine about ideas and tools on how to find waters to go fishing. And I might cover some of the same things here, possibly. There's definitely going to be overlap because there's only so many ways to find new waters. But if you want to look for that article, that magazine, the first issue of the magazine, is available for free. If you go to Tenkara, I think the easiest place to go right now is tenkarausa.com forward slash blog. And we have a couple of blog posts recently, but you'll see the one with the free magazine. And page 39 is where the article is. So you can download the PDF, read what Steve Schweitzer has to say. The main thing, like I was reading the article before I started recording this because I want to make sure not to cover too much of what he has covered.

8:26But the first thing that caught my eye close to the opening of his article was the Tenkara Perfect concept. Many years ago, we started using the term Tenkara Perfect. And he, Steve goes on to define what might be Tenkara Perfect waters as we have done in the past on our blog. So we often talk about Tenkara Perfect as being the kind of tumbly mountain stream, pocket water, you know, place with moving water where a long Tenkara rod would allow you to reach on the other side of the currents like no other rod can do. You have no line to mend. And, you know, so it's those places where presentations can be really challenging with a conventional Western fly fishing setup, but where Tenkara really shines. So oftentimes that's kind of what we talked about when we talked about Tenkara Perfect waters. Now, when I read that, I was like, well, it might be time to redefine Tenkara Perfect for intents and purposes.

9:31And I'm going to suggest that for the time being, Tenkara Perfect is that water close to home that perhaps offers an opportunity for exploration. And it also offers an opportunity for us to step out of our comfort zone. You know, we are in these times where, you know, we are stepping out of our comfort zone, but that might be a good time to kind of look at Tenkara water, Tenkara perfect waters as those that whether we can walk or bicycle to, that are not going to have a lot of people that perhaps are not the types of waters that we're used to fishing. So in the past, we talked about streams. Now they might be a pond. If, you know, perhaps you found that ponds and lakes were the perfect place for Tenkara, you know, are there little irrigation ditches that actually could have fish close to you? Or if you usually fish ponds, you know, is there like a very small creek? So that's kind of what I'd like to suggest is Tenkara perfect for the time being.

10:34now I'm very used to fishing streams you know like when we oftentimes talk about Tenkara in all of our marketing we have focused on the mountain streams you know those are the waters that I typically like to go fishing and I'm very fortunate to have a couple of mountain streams close to home that I could actually bicycle to but even closer to my house I have some ponds and coincidentally at this time of year maybe a little bit later actually we're going to start having a runoff season when the snow starts melting the streams start getting blown out a little too fast to effectively fish so usually like around April May I actually start exploring the ponds close to my house because the water is stable and I have a lot of fun catching those bass the bluegill and so forth they can be a blast you know to catch the the panfish but I want to ask you are there is there a pond maybe close to your home that you never bother fishing you know because you just know that there's panfish in there and maybe they're too easy to catch and I'd like to suggest that you go try those you know they're close to home chances are you have plenty of space to not be near anybody. And you might be surprised, you know, when you step out of that comfort zone and you explore something new and maybe have either a preconceived notion of what a fight with a bluegill might be like, or perhaps you have had the experience in the past and you didn't like it, this might be the perfect opportunity to go and revisit that. Because we all change, you know, and perhaps, you know, 10 years ago, you did a little bit of pond fishing and you caught some bluegill and they're particularly small that day. And this time you go there and you catch a larger bluegill and they're really strong fighters. Or perhaps you used a fly rod, you know, maybe a six weight fly rod, which a lot of us start with. And maybe the fight wasn't particularly great because the rod is kind of stiff. And now you have a tenkara rod in your hand.

12:42that fight with a bluegill in a pond close to your home is going to be significantly different. It's going to give you an incredible amount of joy, really. And it's a lot of fun, you know, to do that, to change the scenery a lot of times. And why not do that right now? The one thing that oftentimes comes up is, you know, people ask me, like, so how do I know if there's fish in the water? And that's, you know, a very valid question. My experience is that most places, if they're not a seasonal creek that dries throughout the dry season and then comes back to life when it snow melts and that kind of thing, if there are a perennial stream or a body of water, there's a very good chance that there's going to be fish in there. and the chances improve you know if the the body of water is linked to a lake um you know whether it's uh you know the little stream is an outlet from a lake or whether it goes into a lake because that lake what chances are it's going to have some fish and the fish are either going to come up the stream or perhaps you know they're going down the stream if if the lake has an outlet and that's where you're fishing now. But one really fun way to know if there are fish, especially now when we're not taking a very far away trip, you know, it's a little different if we're driving two hours to explore a creek that we've never fished before, you know, that's a lot of time to put into with some uncertainty. But the benefit of exploring some waters close to us is that we have chances to fail, but we also have chances to go and observe.

14:33And that's the other thing that I want to bring up here. You know, fishing doesn't have to have a rod, line, and fly. As counterintuitive as it may seem, I think a huge part of fishing, or what makes fishing fishing, is actually just going out and observing the fish. seeing if there are fish there, seeing what they're doing. And if you want to pull out a rod, great. But the sport itself, we call it fishing. We don't call it catching. And that's usually a kind of say that in terms of we're not always catching fish. Sometimes we get skunked. Sometimes we don't have that many fish. We're not calling it catching. We're calling it fishing. So we can look at fishing as the same way as a lot of people look at birding. You know, it might sound funny, but I have taken an incredible amount of joy when I go walk my dog, my dog by a stream, and I see some movement underwater.

15:35And I love just watching those fish, especially the ones close to my home. Because as I mentioned, I have had a chance to fish most bodies of water close to my house. So after a while, I don't feel like I have to be catching those fish. I still do. I still pull my rod out. Now, there's nothing quite like the tug, as we say. The tug is the drug. But if you haven't done that, you know, if you haven't just gone out simply for the sake of watching fish, highly recommend that you do it because when you don't have that objective of catching them, you pay attention to things that you may not have noticed in the past. You know, you might see a fish eating in a different position than you might imagine. You know, like you think that they're always facing upstream, and all of a sudden you notice how much downstream time they're, you know, how much downstream they're facing as well. You might notice that there's bugs that go right by them and they're not taking them.

16:37You know, natural bugs, now your flies. So you can learn a whole lot just by observing. And, of course, when you're scouting waters, you can go walk by a stream, see if you see any movement, see if you see any flashes. Purposefully, maybe sometimes, especially in a stream, but sometimes in a lake too, you can go and purposefully spook the fish, you know, just step in the water, you know, kind of go by a rock, you know, walk a little bit more, you know, make yourself visible and see if you see a little fish darting, you know, from under a rock or towards a rock and that kind of thing. So it's a lot of fun, in my opinion, to go and explore without even having a fishing rod. It's counterintuitive, as I said. Especially in these times, you know, we're trying to kind of try different things, you know, not stay bored and that kind of thing. But when you observe it, you can always go back with a rod and catch a fish when you want to. So that's kind of my thinking, I think, for, you know, scouting waters, figuring out if there are fish.

17:43especially if they're closer to you and that kind of thing. Now, the other thing that I want to talk about in the way that Steve also broke his article up is that there are tools nowadays that are incredibly helpful for us to find waters nearby. I was actually surprised. So just this morning, and this is what inspired the topic for today, I got a message from Faith, my assistant that works with me here at Tenkara USA. And in Boulder, there's a new stay-at-home order. Starting tonight, we're going to have to stay at home, unless it's for exercising or doing some important activities. But she has been exploring. She's actually been in Boulder for longer than I have. She knows a ton of trails around here. She does a lot of hiking. and she just texted me this morning saying that she was on a new she just discovered a new trail that she'd never been to before and she crossed the stream and she's wondering if there's fish there you know so that's kind of the the topic that i just covered but it is amazing that you know for somebody who's hiked as much as she has near her home uh for all of a sudden for her to be exploring a new location and find a body of water that she was not aware of.

19:03I don't know if there's fish there. You know, I think I'm going to have to suggest that she goes and observes it. She said the pools are pretty small, but who knows? You know, sometimes, you know, the water recedes a little bit. Sometimes the condition is a little drier. And the fish will concentrate in those pools, and they're spooky. So they go under the rocks as the first sign of motion, and you don't know if there's fish there because they're hanging down, they're hunkering down, and then when the water goes up, they start coming out of the woodworks, if you will. They start coming out from underneath the rock. So in terms of tools, first of all, of course, exploring. Just go on a trail, especially if you're near bodies of water. I don't think she expected to cross a stream today, or yesterday, I think is when she hiked. But in terms of tools, there are two particular ones that I want to mention. Nowadays, we have all this beautiful technology that allows us to scout out places. First of all, the first one is one that most likely you're familiar with, which is Google Earth or Google Maps.

20:10But Google Earth in particular, I find it helpful because you can see the terrain relief in 3D. And oftentimes, if you kind of see something that could funnel water down, you can kind of start observing where drainages may form and where the streams are going to be. So that's kind of fun to be able to follow a drainage, you know, in Google Earth. And sometimes the map may not even show there's a blue line in there. They usually do, but I have come across a couple places that didn't have a blue line, and I found water, and I have found fish. And it's rare. I don't think that's very common. or maybe the map that I was looking at just didn't have it. Other maps might have had it. But that's one thing I want to mention. The other one, obviously, is topographic maps. You see a blue squiggly line or a filled blue circle. Those are going to be bodies of water. And those are often places that are good to explore.

21:15They're a little bit more obvious. But the other thing that I suggest when you look at topographic maps, If you're not very familiar with it, look for the legend for canals. And I have seen it where canals didn't look like streams because they're straight lines. And the legend might be different in every map, you know, for what a canal looks like or an irrigation ditch. And I have some of those close to my house here. And I'm familiar with most of them, but I didn't know where they go. So sometimes I go into the map and I kind of see where he ends up. And a lot of these places have fish. It might depend on where you are and that kind of thing, but I have found that the canals here have some, there's one irrigation ditch that has trout, and they tend to come up a lot when the water goes high, you know, and just more water flowing. They come out of the lake, and we find a pretty big trout, actually. Other place that I fished before, and we actually made some videos, have carp and large bass as well.

22:19like small mouth but pretty large size bass. So have you ever explored those? Are they within reach from your house? Can you bicycle? Can you walk to them? Or maybe a short drive, we can still drive. But here's my favorite tool, the one that I want to mention because I've been using it a lot for all kinds of activities that I do, which is Gaia, G-A-I-A. And most of the stuff that I'm referring here, I'm going to put on the podcast page for this podcast episode. So if you go to tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast, you're going to find this episode on finding waters. There's going to be a link to Gaia. But Gaia is a mapping app. I think it's available on every phone. And what I love about it, and there might be other ones that do similar things, but Gaia has a really large number of layers that you can download and you can turn them on and off and you can change the transparency of the layers there's too many for me to count but there's going to be like you know slope shading so you can see kind of like what kind of shading there is but there's also like there's actually bodies of water layers, I believe, in there as well. There's a lot of them. But my favorite layer that I have found I use all the time is the, there's two layers, actually. And once you download Gaia, it starts becoming a little bit more intuitive, what I'm talking about. But the two layers that I use a lot are public land, US, obviously, I'm talking about the United States, private land, and public access properties.

24:07That's three, but public land and private land layers. I use that all the time. They're overlaid over my main Gaia map. And the reason I use those is because oftentimes I might see a body of water, and every state is going to be different. But in Colorado, if there's private property on both sides, you may not have access to it. if somebody owns both sides of the stream. Technically, I'm not supposed to be in the water over there. So there's a stream close to my house here, not too far anyways, where I can only go a certain distance. But you can see who owns the property, which I never go ask for permission, but you can see if there's some public access or if there's access issues Or if you can just go there because it's part of National Forest, National Parks, open spaces and whatnot, that's in your area. So those are terrific apps.

25:07And I use the public lens a lot as well because it shows you National Forest. Not right now, obviously, because I'm not camping, but I use that a lot for camping throughout the year because I can camp in National Forest for free. there's actually I'm looking at my app right now because it's trying to remember the layers that I like if you go there there's a net geographic fishing and river maps layer that you can overlay over your map as well and there is a a trails map as well so there's all kinds of layers that you can download. And this is a tool that is available for free with a limited amount of functionality. But you can also pay, I think it was like 30 something dollars a year. And I pay that. I pay for the premium access because I can download any of the layers they have. I can save all these different places. And I record most of the times that I'm out because The other way that it comes in handy is when you're exploring, especially in New Water, and especially if it's a place where, you know, it's densely wooded, you know, there's not a whole lot of features, you don't want to get lost.

26:25and especially now, you know, I've been kind of keeping an eye out on the search and rescue team here, which I'm trying to join in Boulder, and there's all these notifications asking people not to take risks because they don't want to expose the search and rescue volunteers. Some search and rescue volunteers might be going through things. Maybe they work in healthcare and so forth. So we want to minimize any chances of injury or getting lost. But what I always do, and I'll tell you a story in a second, but what I always try to do is when I go to a new body, a new place, and I want to explore, it's not a fail-proof thing. My battery can run out. I can drop my phone in the water and whatnot, but I always record my track because if I get confused about where I am, I can always follow you back. And yes, you know, it's not fail-proof. As I mentioned ideally i'm going to have a printed map with me as well it's really handy to have that but the best map that you have is the one that is always with you so i've never had an issue until last year when i was in a new place it wasn't a fishing trip i was actually foraging for mushrooms and you know my wife and i were exploring a new area we do this all the time we explore we forage for edible mushrooms.

27:53And we get to this place and we start finding more else type of mushroom that we like eating. And I didn't turn Gaia on. I didn't turn any of the maps on because the idea is that we never would get more than like a couple hundred yards from the car. You know, we should be able to see the car at all times. And we've done this so many times that I was like, yeah, it's no big deal. and that led to the one of the more terrifying experiences of my life because so there we are hunting for mushrooms or you know an hour an hour and a half the mosquitoes are getting really bad and margaret wants to go back to the car so i was like okay and uh she was a little afraid that she would get lost and i'm like no you don't have to worry you can actually see the car and we could see the van uh right there so it's just a straight line for her to get to it she went left me alone because I was never supposed to be far away from the car. I didn't have much water. I probably had like a quarter cup of water in my small bottle. Didn't have a light.

28:54Didn't have a fire starting thing. I had nothing. Quarter cup of water and a little knife that I was using to cut mushrooms, which was not much. The mosquito was also really bad, as I mentioned. So she left, went to the car. I told her I'll probably be there in about half an hour. but the problem too is that she knows that my half an hour is never half an hour you know she's very used to me just saying like oh yeah I'll be there in a minute and an hour later I'm there you know she had some reading material she stayed in a van you know she probably wouldn't bother looking for me but all of a sudden I start finding a lot of mushrooms a lot of edible mushrooms and I'm picking them left and right and I'm picking them and I'm looking down So in that entire time, I started feeling a little anxious. Because every time I would turn, pick some more mushrooms, and we were in a very densely wooded area with no features nearby. There was no hills. There was no streams nearby.

29:54There was nothing. It was just very, very flat on top of a hilly kind of area. A lot of trees all looked the same. And the entire time, every time I turn around, I'm telling myself, okay, the car is over this shoulder. and I turned around a little bit more to pick more mushrooms. Okay, now the car is there. And I thought I was keeping good track of it. All of a sudden, I feel like I'm done. I feel like it's getting late. The mosquitoes are starting to get to me. So I decided to go back to the car. I started walking in the direction I thought the car should be. And I'm not getting to it. And I started walking and I'm not getting to the car. So I, you know, decided to stop for a second, and decided to pull up a map for the first time. I pulled up Google Maps because I had pulled the directions to get to this place. It was in the National Forest. I thought I knew roughly which dirt roads we took and parked. So I pulled the map, and I think I know where the car is. So I start going the direction.

30:57And I started walking, and I walk about 10 more minutes, and I'm not getting to the car. and all of a sudden I started seeing features which I hadn't seen. I saw like a bog, you know, like just some marshy kind of area. And then I know that I'm in the wrong place. And luckily I had had this issue in a much lower consequence area when I was traveling abroad. And Google Maps was sending me in the wrong way because there's a flaw, there's some kind of bug where on my iPhone in particular, the model I think was the XS, the compass orientation in Google Maps can be reversed for some reason. And luckily I remember that and I'm like, shit, Google Maps is sending me the wrong way. So I pulled up Gaia and for some reason Gaia was accurate and it was actually showing me the exact opposite orientation. So I started following that for a while, about 20 minutes later I get to the car but really taught me the value of always having a recording device with me if I'm exploring a new area especially if it doesn't have a whole lot of features luckily if you're in a stream things can be a little easier because usually there's kind of some kind of drainage and usually you know if you're going up or down the stream and that kind of thing but sometimes you don't because you have to be a little farther away so just a Last alarm for me, something that I thought I'd share as I close this episode of the Tenkara Cast.

32:25Love to connect with you, you know, especially if you have something to add, any tools, any strategies that you have used to find in waters that were new to you, that were outside of your comfort zone. But also, like, would love to hear from you. What are you doing in these times? You know, like when are you spending more time inside? Are you exploring some waters that you hadn't explored before? If you come to our podcast page, tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast, and you look for the finding waters, leave a comment right there. You can do it being logged in via Facebook or just through our blog page directly, or leave us a comment in Facebook and social media. We just love to see what you're up to. These times, these days, we're asked to be socially distant. But I realize that I absolutely hate that term, as I've heard some other people saying. What I prefer to say is that we are distancing together. You know, we have to physically distance, but it's a great time for us to connect a little bit more closely.

33:31Luckily, we have the channels to do that nowadays. You know, if this happened 20 plus years ago, maybe it'll be a little bit harder to connect. But let's connect. let's see what you're up to what you're exploring how you're spending your time leave us a comment and once again thank you so very much for supporting the sale that we're doing 30 off on all rods for spreading message and so forth thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the tenkara cast and until next time And as always, I'd like to especially thank Nick Ogawa Takenobu. You can find his music at takenobumusic.com, as well as our Spotify playlists. In Spotify, just look up Tenkara, and you should find Tenkara tunes with a lot of Takenobu's music. You'll find any information referenced in this podcast at tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast.

34:37just find the link to this podcast episode and you'll find any photos, links or other information referenced right there this song is called Voyage Across the Sea here by Tecumor Thank you.