Short Cast: Excuses, part 2

0:00Thanks for listening to the Tenkara Cast. This is a short cast where we talk for just a few minutes about your favorite subject, Tenkara. This episode is made possible by your purchase of Tenkara USA rods, lines, and flies. I think everybody's gonna start thinking of this podcast as the podcast about reasons we don't catch fish you're gonna start thinking that uh maybe in Tenkara we don't catch fish but uh it's uh it's kind of funny I uh had a couple of days recently that were kind of slow uh we did catch fish we were not skunked but I was like the entire time I was like wondering why are we not catching fish and I was actually taking two people that were very new to Tenkara and in places and the amount of time that I normally would have caught about 10 fish we were catching like one or two so it's a little embarrassing but I kind of wanted to share some thoughts that I had because like, you know, I was wondering, like, what is it that we can be doing differently? And a little while ago, I did the podcast about excuses we can use when we don't catch fish.

1:22And I mentioned, of course, that the flies are never the reason we don't catch fish. The fly that you have on is always the right fly. I should have mentioned, of course, that my technique is always perfect so the technique is not the reason as well and you know as I was trying to kind of get this you know this folks to to catch fish and I was wondering like what is it that could have happened here so I came up with a couple more excuses actually a few more excuses that we may have not been catching fish in those days and I wanted to share those with you today Hopefully, my next episode on this podcast is going to be reasons we caught a lot of fish today. That's my hope. But in any case, I've got a few excuses I wanted to share with you that you may potentially use next time you take somebody fishing. The first one is one that I get faced with very frequently, actually.

2:23it's um this reason unfortunately as part of my job is something that maybe it is true and it's always a hard one but first reason that you may not be catching fish is that there's somebody watching you so in those cases I'm kind of there demonstrating my techniques you know and kind of trying to show people like what you can do with a tenkara rod and you can do this beautiful drag free drifts and it can pulsate the fly and it can do all these different things. But I was not catching fish. I've had experiences before where, you know, I go to demonstrate in every cast almost I'll catch a fish. Or not every cast, but in every technique I'll catch a fish. But in any case, these were not the cases last week. So the excuse number one is that people are watching you. And this one is always a good one, you know, because there's, if you're going with a group and somebody's trying to learn from you and you're not catching fish, it's like, well, maybe too many people are watching me. So that's something that hopefully you don't have to use very often, but it's there for you to use when you need to.

3:31The second reason, you know, and I was thinking about this one because very often when people are getting into fly fishing, they're very new to the sport of fly fishing, they may or may not know whether there's really fish in a particular stream so in those cases you can say i don't think there's any fish here so that's excuse number two there's no fish in the stream or in this pool the fish might have migrated upstream or downstream but they're definitely not here right now unfortunately i couldn't release those excuses or that second excuse when when I took people out because it's Boulder Creek it's my home water it's a piece of water that I always fish so that was not a very valid excuse for me but when I was talking to them you know and they're wondering they were asking me oh are there fish in this part of the river and I'm like yeah yeah there's always fish there and they didn't believe there were but I know there are so that's one you can use you know it's like if you're going to a new place and you're going by by yourself you can just kind of tell yourself there's probably no fish here and move on to a different spot now if by chance you know you know that there's fish in there like because you fish the week before and you caught fish which was my uh particular situation um you know there's fish in there and I told him like hey I'm taking you to this spot because there's fish here and then you can use the third excuse of today's episode which is somebody must have already fished here so that excuse is really good if you're going to be fishing a particular spot later in the day not a really good one when you're taking somebody some friend out fishing at six o'clock in the morning it's hard to tell that somebody has fished there before you if you have a very early start But if you kind of come a little bit later in the day, you can say, well, you know, you fish for a while.

5:33You fish for like 20, 30 minutes. And typically you expect a couple of fish to have come and taken your fly. You can always say, well, I guess somebody must have already fished this. Let's move on. Let's get in a car and move upstream to a different spot or downstream. And if you continue using that excuse, it's going to start losing credibility. So be careful with that one. you have to use it very sporadically in any case that's my my thought for today i took a couple of people out fishing recently they were watching me i was not catching fish and i knew there were fish there so i couldn't use the second excuse but we were fishing later in the day so i kind of said well i wonder if somebody's already fished here hopefully next time i'm going to be talking about reasons you caught a lot of fish on a particular day. So that was a small part of the song called Limbo by Takenobu.

7:04Check out his music at takenobumusic.com