Social Distancing

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. Hey everyone, it's been a while. Welcome back to the Tenkara Cast. My name is Daniel Galhardo. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. If you're a long-time listener, my apologies for not creating an episode for quite a long time.

1:02I had a long run, you know, created about 60 episodes, and, you know, to be honest, I actually started feeling pretty significant depression, you know, and that's, it might be something that I've been dealing with for years, but it had been kind of pushed down, and I had enough going on that I never let it kind of overtake me. And at a certain point, I maybe gave in to it. And I'm not sure if that's accurate, but it kind of overwhelmed me for a period of time. So I kind of took a break, and I've actually started looking for help over a year ago. And, you know, it's been really, really helpful. I kind of feel like I'm starting to feel better. I usually don't like to share much about my personal life, but I thought I'd kind of start talking about why, you know, I took a long break from creating a podcast. Because it is something that our society faces, you know, depression.

2:04We probably don't talk enough about it. There's enough stigma, you know, there's still enough. even myself I think you know I think I resisted looking for treatment for a long time because I kind of felt like yeah I can snap out of it maybe I don't have anything maybe I'm just kind of feeling whatever it is you know and trying to find reasons why maybe that's not what it was but at a certain point it became undeniable it became absolutely difficult to ignore and I started needing to look for help. And I'm really glad I did. I think there has been some stuff that has been said, but I kind of wanted to reiterate here. You know, fishing, for example, or the outdoors. I did spend a lot of time in the outdoors in the last year, but it is not a cure, you know, and there is, it doesn't even come close, really. It can be therapeutic. It can help. It can kind of be a nice distraction. There's a lot of value to it. It can keep us from quite getting to that point sometimes. But once you're in it, you know, the outdoors are simply not a cure to depression.

3:18And I kind of wanted to say that, you know, because I did get a fair number of comments, which is understandable, you know, but a fair number of comments is like, oh, yeah, just get outdoors and well, I'm already there, but it's not quite helping. So if you're dealing with that, you know, if you're struggling with something that's kind of been keeping you down, maybe look for help. You know, that's kind of the only thing that I want to share here. The outdoors, they help, but they're not gonna get you out of there, at least for the most part, You know, at least if you're having some deeper issues and that kind of thing. But you do need to look for help. And that's kind of the, you know, it was hard for me to go out there. Luckily, I have a wife that has a background, you know, in psychology. And she, you know, kept insisting. And I followed her advice. It was a struggle to kind of take that first step. and I went through a couple of therapists to find somebody who, you know, started kind of really helping, started taking medications as well. It's really difficult to know if that is really the help, but, you know, the consensus is that, you know, depending on where you are, therapy and medication combined are really kind of the solution. So, yeah, there's stigma with it.

4:42I don't care. It is something that more people than you can imagine have to deal with. And unfortunately, either us as people or society as a general oftentimes get into this denial phase. I have this life where I have absolutely nothing to feel depressed about. And that's kind of why I think I kept resisting. It's like, okay, I've got this beautiful company. You know, we do a great amount of good. I have a beautiful home, a really comfortable roof over my head. I can spend as much time as I want pretty much traveling in the outdoors. I live in a beautiful place. But, you know, that doesn't mean anything. It can be having the worst difficulties. You can be struggling with a lot of things and maybe not have the issues with depression that some of us might have, or you can have everything and still suffer with it.

5:43So that's the, I wanted to start the podcast just kind of explaining a little bit of my absence. Maybe not the only reason, but definitely something that at a certain point I crashed and it was hard to kind of come back and start creating episodes. But that's it for that part. I'm not looking for any pity. As a matter of fact, I probably prefer not to get, you know, encouraging messages. I don't know, I just kind of feel self-conscious. I feel good enough that I sought help and I kind of feel like there's a little bit of a bouncing back, you know, and that's plenty. and the only message is for, instead of sending me messages, what I think I'd prefer is if you see somebody in your life, a friend, just ask, you know, like, are you dealing with depression, you think, or, you know, have you sought some treatment or have you sought help, professional help, and just kind of use that messaging on that side. A little bit of a gloomy podcast today, you know, so I start with that. I do feel pretty good right now, I should say. But now I jump into the COVID-19, you know, so it's, we, first of all, you know, like everybody knows what we're dealing with in the planet on earth, you know, every corner of earth is, almost every corner on earth is kind of being affected by COVID-19, the coronavirus. It's something that it is affecting all of us. It's creating an incredible amount of anxiety for everybody for a lot of reasons. It's affecting me and my wife, you know, personally in some ways because my wife, she's a nursing assistant. She's working in a hospital and you read the news about how there's a shortage of equipment, like personal protective equipment or protective personal equipment that nurses have to use to prevent or, you know, stay away from getting sick, get away from getting sick. And there's a shortage of it, and she's facing it. You know, so it's really stressful to know that my wife is going to the hospital to work with patients, and they don't have masks, for example. You know, like they're being asked to use one mask the entire day, you know, and that's just unacceptable.

8:14You know, they're dealing with not only COVID-19 patients, but sometimes other contagious diseases and other problems, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, for example, and they don't want to throw their masks away because they don't have much of a supply. So it's not a fun thing to have on the back of your mind, not only for personal reasons, but for the entire United States and other countries as well, to know that the people on the front lines dealing with this are not really being protected. now there's also the struggle with businesses you know like a lot of communities around you are closing um you know to keep people inside restaurants are being asked to only do delivery or you know or take out uh and that's impacting the economy as a whole so it's really a stressful time i've been seeing a lot of friends that are dealing with anxiety stemming from a variety of issues. So I thought it was kind of an appropriate time to come in and talk a little bit about it because we are, you know, in fly fishing with Tancata USA, we are promoting a really good social distancing tool. You know, these times I want to talk a little bit about social distancing, but most of all, you know, these times we're asked to do our part to stay away from one another so that we can, at the very least, at this point in the stage of the evolution of the disease here in the States and many other countries, we're asked to, at the very least, flatten the curve.

9:52We pretty much succumb to the fact that we're not going to be able to completely avoid it. So at the very least, we should avoid each other as much as we can, give each other space so that we don't all have to go to the hospital at once. And the social distancing thing, it's extremely important. I've talked to a friend who's had training in epidemiology. I've been reading a lot of information from the CDC and the WHO. And it's undeniable that if we don't do that right now, we are going to suffer tremendously in the long term. Even just looking at what's happening in the hospitals here in the local hospital, the amount of stress that they're dealing with, with a few things coming in, not even for COVID-19. It's really, really, it's insane, to be honest. And if all of a sudden we start getting sick, something that we could have avoided right now, you know, and just wait as long as we can, we're going to help them a lot.

10:56So the message is real. You know, I think some people may think that we're overreacting. And the paradox here is that if in a few months, if we look back and we thought that we overreacted, it's because the overreaction worked. You know, that's kind of one of the messages I want to get here. It's like if we do not overreact, in a few months we could wake up to a position where 10 million people in the United States could be infected. out of that maybe at least 100,000 people, a lot of grandparents might have died or spent a lot of time at the ICU and so forth. And it's just not going to be fun. I would much rather wake up in a few months or in a couple months and be like, oh man, we totally overreacted. We didn't need to do that. And that's the reality of it is that I just kind of had this thought, like no government wants to shut down its economy, ask its citizens to stay home. If they're doing that, you know that the thing is serious. We are only seeing some parts of it, but it's not whether you believe it or not.

12:09The science is there. The numbers are there. The statistics are there. We need to keep away from each other. This is not the flu. It spreads much more easily. It gets a lot more people sick. he also sends a lot more people into intensive care units he also sends a lot more people to the grave you know like two percent on average i mean there's numbers all over the place between one and four percent on average is what i've seen even if it is one percent we're looking at maybe about 10 times more deadly than the flu if not more actually because the flu is a 0.2 percent I believe, is the rate of mortality. We're looking now at at least 1%. If 10 million people get sick, we're looking at 100,000 deaths right there. So something to keep in mind. Now, how does this all tie into fly fishing? And how does it tie into Tenkara? Why am I doing a podcast about it? So there's a couple of reasons. First of all, we are really lucky to have this activity that we all love that is so conducive to social distancing. We can go to the stream even when things are, you know, social distancing is not being called for. We stay away from each other. We are not going to be fishing six, ten feet away from each other. And it's really easy to do in the sport that we like. We have the streams, we have lakes, we have ponds that we can fish and not be next to somebody. We also have fly tying, you know, which is a really nice activity when you're asked to be inside the house all day long. If you go to tenkarausa.com, you can find at least a dozen videos on how to tie flies. And if you don't have advice, if you feel like you don't have the tools that you need to start tying flies and you're bored at home, just know this, I started tying flies with absolutely no tools when I was a kid.

14:08All you need is a hook. You need a little bit of string. If you don't have a spool of sewing thread, you don't need that. You can just kind of get some, like, string that's coming out of some fraying clothes. Or if you have a rag, you can get a string out of that. And you need, you know, some feathers. And honestly, if you don't have that, the very first tie that I tied in my life, when I was about, I think I was about 13 years old, I used a feather from a down pillow. So you have that option. If you're spending more time indoors and you want to learn a new skill, you can learn how to tie flies using materials that you already have with you. Hook, thread, feathers. If you already have the materials, you can just tie flies. That's a very fun thing to do. The other thing too, if you're curious, if you don't have a vise, we have at least two, maybe three videos on our website on how to tie tenkara flies without using a vise.

15:10So you see Mr. Sebata, one of our teachers in Japan, Mr. Amano, and I think there's a video by John Gere, one of our staff members, all tying flies just using string hook and feather, holding a hook in their hand. now the other thing that we're trying to do kind of to help um in those terms you know of kind of keeping you sane when you're inside is kind of bringing about some good content uh for you to produce so the podcast is actually part of it um i got motivated to come back pull my recorder out right now so that I'll bring you some content to keep you company. And the other thing that we did yesterday, we put all of our Tenkara magazines, the three issues that we created in the past, we put them on our blog available for free downloads so that you can read those articles. And a very cool project by our designer, Jeremy Shellhorn. He put together a coloring book for your family, yourself, your kids, to spend a little bit of time just kind of doing something, keeping your mind off of everything that's going on. So that's kind of what we're doing for what we're going to call practicing side portion of our social distancing. You know, what we're asking to being asked to do, which is social distancing, and there's the practicing side part of it. Now let's talk a little bit about the practice outside part of social distancing. So what that is, you know, as I mentioned a second ago, fishing is already a social distancing kind of thing. But there's a little bit of responsibility that comes with that. You know, sometimes some people are seeing this as an opportunity to go travel, to go to the country, you know, to kind of take their trip and kind of stay away from it all. And the first thing I want to bring up is that yes, we do want to spend time outside, but we need to do it responsibly. And I believe the best way to do that is to stay close to home. There's a lot of communities already that are begging people not to come by, not to go to their communities, their small towns where a lot of good fishing might be because, first of all, they don't want more exposure to the virus than they need to have.

17:35And that's really important because if a small community, you know, which doesn't have much infrastructure, they may not even have a hospital with a respirator, which we might have shortages of, if they start having a lot of sick people, they're going to become overwhelmed really, really quickly. And it is really important that we stay away from those communities, that we don't expose them to more of the virus than they need to be exposed to. So that's number one. You know, try to stay local. Stay really close to your home. Stay somewhere that, you know, instead of doing overnight trips, which I'd love to do. I mean, I love doing overnight trips. I love to go camping. I love to go somewhere far away. But I am staying away from those communities right now because maybe I'm infected. At this point, we kind of have to assume that we might have the infection, and I want to reduce my chance of transmitting it to somebody else. So that's kind of number one. But the other thing, too, if I am somewhere a few hours away from home and anything happens to me, you know, if I fall and I get a cut, if I have anything that causes me to go to the hospital, car accident, anything, health care workers right now, whether they're dealing with a lot of cases of the COVID-19 or not, they're under really big stress they're trying to prepare this is new to them the leadership in the hospital especially smaller hospitals but big ones as well as i've been learning they are trying to adapt and they're not quite there yet you know there are every patient that comes in to the hospital is a series of decisions that they have to make is this person you know if If this person is conscious, are they coughing?

19:22Are they a potential risk? Are the visitors with them, visitors that are coming to see them or people with them, are they potentially sick? Do we have to treat them differently? Do we have the masks to do it? Do we have the beds to kind of take them on? How long is this person unconscious? Are we going to have to bring a surgeon out? There's a tremendous number of little decisions that they have to make, and we make their job incredibly difficult when we don't take responsibility, when we go fishing and we have an issue where they might need to hospitalize us. So that's kind of my soapbox for today. Let's socially distance, but stay close to home. I'm seeing firsthand right here my wife coming back every day from the hospital, incredibly stressed by the number of things that are happening. where they just have uncertainties, they have stresses they're dealing with.

20:25They are using the language of deployment and war in the hospital. So, for example, she worked in a different department that normally wouldn't be dealing with, you know, potential respiratory infections and that kind of thing, but they are being literally they're calling let's deploy to this department because they need help there right now. And the managers are saying, we are a war here, people. Unfortunately, they're a war, but they're also not being given the tools that they need. They're not able to test patients before they treat them. They're not having the masks and the protective equipment and so forth. So let's do our part, stay close to home, be responsible. If you're thinking of taking that trip somewhere, maybe reconsider it. I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I do want to share the message. I'm going to stay low. I'm going to stay close to home. I'm not going to go into a small community that I cannot come back home the same day. And, you know, potentially, you know, just, in fact, people will put them at more stress than they need to deal with.

21:32The other thing, too, there's a ton of information out there. And I'm not going to be your source of information. There's too many people that are trying to do that. They're trying to, with good intentions. They're trying to disseminate information without quite knowing where that comes from. They're kind of clinging on to the barrage of things that they see that they think that might help, you know, in terms of different drugs and tests and blah, blah, blah. All I'm going to ask is that you look for the most reliable sources right now. And whether you believe it or not, you know, like whether you have certain conspiracy tendencies or not, unfortunately the most reliable sources that we have right now are probably the CDC and WHO. You know, and you can make your own decisions, inform decisions about where you get your source, but I kind of feel like those are, you know, usually guided by science, and there's good information there. So keep an eye on those channels, and very independent news channels.

22:40You know, I kind of believe the BBC is like one of the ones that I look at. I just kind of feel like they're just, you know, give me the information without their opinion. Oftentimes, sometimes there's some opinion, but that's, you know, you always take that with a grain of salt. And go fishing. You know, and here's the other thing that I wanted to talk about. If you're completely new to this podcast, however you're finding us, first of all if you're ready to fish with tenkara thank you you have a great tool in your hand you can go fishing very easily a tenkara rod kind of extended tells you how long you how far away you should stay from the person nearby you 12 feet is a good guidance even though six feet is the actual what they're asking people to stay away from each other you know indoors but i stay at least 12 feet away from somebody from fishing. So there's that part. But the other thing too, if you have a friend who, you know, maybe he's got extra time, who wants to do something outside, who's not being asked to stay at home all the time, and who has a pond nearby, you know, a stream nearby, Tenkaata is really the best tool that you can have right now to learn how to fish on your own.

23:56You know, it's fly fishing. If we're trying to teach somebody, we have to be there with the person. We got to hold that person's hand. We got to kind of do things for that person. And that's not very conducive to social distancing. Tenkara is, you know, you have a rod, tie a line to the fly, blah, blah, blah, blah, very easy setup. But everything you need to know is compiled. You can find everything you need to know actually on our tenkarausa.com forward slash book. Our website is a really rich resource. You can find everything you need to know there. But if you just go to the link, tenkarausa.com forward slash book. The first thing you'll see is the book. And there's other pages that do that on our website, but this is the one that came to mind. But immediately below, you don't have to buy the book, but immediately below, there's going to be a series of videos that in roughly 20 minutes tell you everything you need to know about how to tenkara fish on your own, how to teach yourself how to tenkara fly fish on your own. So you learn how to rig the rod, how to cast, how to manipulate the stuff. But most of it, Tenkara is very intuitive. You watch those videos to kind of mostly, I think, know how to rig. The other parts of it, when you go to the water, they're not hard to learn, so you can learn on your own. And with that, I'm going to also ask for a little bit of a favor. If you have the person who's interested in fly fishing in your life, if you can send them to our website, we'd really appreciate it. Like any small business, We've been kind of taking a bit of a hit, understandably.

25:25You know, people don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. But our sales have, you know, completely declined in the last week, which is understandable. But I do want to ask you for a little bit of a favor. If you have been thinking of purchasing a Tenkara rod or if you want to get some flies, we're still operational. If you have somebody in your life, you know, that you want to get a rod for or somebody who's been thinking of purchasing a Tenkara USA rod, send them to our website, tenkarausa.com. If they like what they see, if they like the product, they've been thinking about buying it, we can use the help just because our sales have slowed down a lot. And, you know, we got to support our staff members and even our local community too. You know, it's just, you know, we're trying to do some parts of what we can here as well as everybody is, you So not only for ourselves. I mean, if you have, it doesn't have to be us, but I thought I'd mention it, that it's not easy on us as well.

26:25But think about the businesses around you. We here at home, we actually purchased a lot of food weeks in advance. We had a really good pantry, so we wouldn't have to leave the home as much as we could. But I just had this thought yesterday. It's like, you know, like we can cook at home. We can keep cooking at home for a month without having to buy food. But things are still open. let's go buy some takeout food. And there's a Chinese restaurant close to home here. I kind of figured they're probably struggling. It's not their fault. We just bought some Chinese food to go yesterday. Went there, took it out, and it was delicious. They were grateful, I could tell in their faces. And, you know, let's do our part with our community. We are all in this together. We're all on the same boat. And we can come through this. We're going to help each other out. And we'll come stronger on the other side. So think about the local business that you can support near you. Restaurants are taking a hit, obviously. Asian restaurants are taking a hit. You know, I think there's a lot of ignorance out there and we don't need to add to that. I actually personally trust my Chinese restaurant here a lot more than some other places where, you know, I'm noticing some college students are not socially distancing right now and trying to stay away from the places where college students might still be congregating.

27:46So just a thought. We all can do our part. It doesn't necessarily have to be fishing. So that's my soapbox for today. That's my revival of the Tenkara Cast, talking a little bit about what we are facing. We all have our struggles. Everybody has a different but no less, no more challenging set of circumstances in their lives. And whether it's depression, whether it's other mental health issues that are out there, whether it's COVID, especially these invisible challenges that we have, they're really, really tough to grasp. Whether it's depression, you know, we can't see it. Sometimes you don't know it's there. Sometimes we have a feeling something is wrong, but it's invisible. It's not a broken arm. You know, it's not a laceration on the arm or the head. COVID, it's an invisible thing.

28:48We can't see where the virus is, but it's real. You know, it's all real. It all affects us in one way or another. So because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not real. Sometimes you may feel like we are overreacting, you know, with all these issues that I'm talking about. but usually when it feels like we overreacted it's because things worked so that's kind of the the message that i'm going to leave with here and the other one is get outside you know remain remain um comfortable in knowing that we have a lot going for us and take some time for yourself if you've never this is a good time to explore some places or do certain things that maybe you've never done. If you're always a stream fisherman, but you have a little pond close to your home that you can walk or bike to, maybe explore that today. You know, and just kind of try catching a bass if you've never won or a crappie. And, you know, if you, there's a lot of options out there.

29:53So let us know, you know, connect with us. We are going to try to engage a little bit more, put more content out for you guys to connect with us. We hope everybody's staying safe at home, everybody's staying sane, and that the anxiety and the fear that we're all feeling doesn't get the worst of you. We're all going to come through this together, and hopefully we can beat this and not have this last longer than it needs to. Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in to an episode of the Tenkara Cast. It is actually exciting now that I finish this episode to be back in the studio here recording an episode for you, connecting with you. And I've also been noticing I started connecting a little bit more on social media. You know, I've stayed away from that for a long time for a variety of reasons. But social distancing physically might mean that I get back a little bit more on the social media channels. So thanks, everyone, for listening.

30:55and until next time, we'll see when I create the next one, but I'll try to keep doing this for you now. And as always, I'd like to specially 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 to this podcast at tenkarausa.com. forward slash podcast just 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 by takin Thank you.