Destinations: Tenkara in Texas, with Chris Johnson

0:00If fly-fishing is my hatchet, then Tenkara is my scalpel. It allows me to go places and do things that I might not otherwise be able to do. This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast, we'll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and 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's only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos 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 method of fly fishing. Hey everyone, thanks for coming back to the Tenkara Cast. Today I'm very pleased to have one of our new guests, Chris Johnson, who owns the fly shop Living Waters Fly Fishing or Living Waters Fly Shop in Round Rocks, Texas, one of the Tenkara USA dealers, one of the early dealers for Tenkara USA.

1:08Welcome, Chris, to the Tenkara Cast. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Just last week, I had the pleasure to visit Texas for my first time and get out and spend a decent amount of time fishing with you. We had a great time, and I thought that we should introduce our listeners to Tenkara in Texas, because you've been doing a lot of it there yourself. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how the Tenkara fishing is in Texas as an overview? Daniel, I think that's one of the things that's really the most special about Texas is the fact that you have so many different species that you can target with Tenkara. So, I mean, you have, I mean, you have obviously the whole bass array with largemouth bass, Guadalupe bass, our state fish, of course. There's even some pockets of smallmouth bass and spotted bass, depending on where you're at in the state. We have a very wide variety of sunfish, which all of those are perfect Tenkara targets. And you also have, you know, various other species that can be a little bit more difficult, like carp and certain species of suckers.

2:13And then we have one that's very unique that I am very fond of personally, and that's the Rio Grande Cichlid, which I think it is one of the finest Tenkara targets, really maybe on the earth, just because of how well size range with activity mixes with the fish. yeah that's uh there's a huge variety there i mean texas is a you know enormous state and uh you know i'll be honest it kind of surprised me uh to see the uptake of tenkara in the state of texas uh because when i started introducing tenkara here you know we focused on trout waters mountain streams um and when we started seeing a lot of people taking up tenkara in texas it's like oh that's really cool you know people are you know fishing for all these different species and but then I was also surprised when I got to visit there that there's some streams that look like mountain streams that I'm used to fishing so very great variety of waters and fish and and it is that so why don't you tell us a little bit more about your experience with Tenkara specifically has that been surprising that Tenkara has been well received in Texas I don't know if it's as much of a surprise as it is something that it's kind of answered really a need for Texas anglers in the hill country of just the need for, you know, the ability.

3:41The thing I say about Tenkara is that it it lets fly fishing happen. You don't have to plan on it. You can quite simply take a rod with you, you know, very limited supply of lines, a little box full of flies. And as you well saw when you were here, a lot of this, a lot of the fishing opportunities here are very urban where we can literally step out of the car and go catch a fish, get right back in the car. And it's made a great way for me to squeeze in little extra bits of fishing time before and after work and for our customers and our clientele as well. The approachability of the sport, I don't think has ever been better where they can pick up a tenkara rod and then go have fun. I make, you know, casting is very simplistic. It's great for, you know, first time anglers and children alike. And so for me, as a shop owner and as a guide, it is really helped kind of fill a niche that many people were very afraid of fly fishing just because of the skill level that it requires. And Tenkara has made a way for us to be able to get into that very, very easily and introduce people to it in such a way that they are introduced in the sport very quickly.

4:49I really like what you said it lets fly fishing happen that's uh that's actually something that I'll have to borrow from you for uh for a quote that's terrific don't worry it's not copyrighted you're fine yeah but I think it's uh you know it's true it just kind of lets it happen and you know where we were and I'll ask you a little bit more about the geography of Texas in a minute but where you know we had a chance to fish not not too far away from Austin you know an urban kind of center. And I get the impression that there's a lot of waters, waterways in the urban environments around Texas. And the idea of letting fly fish happen, like if you see a piece of water that you want to fish and that kind of thing, that's pretty neat. Is that, do you find that a lot of people in Texas are fishing that way, kind of like impromptu fishing or like not very long trips and close to home and stuff like that? I think we'd all love the opportunity to, you know, take days out at a time and go fish like that. And I know many people do. And I'm blessed with a job that, you know, I'm able to be on the water a little bit more than some. But the thing that's really great about our community here is that so many people live less than, you know, 20 minutes away from very, very great fisheries in the hill country. You fished Brushy Creek when you were here. And I mean, it literally is across the street from the fly shop. So there's plenty of days where, you know, I'll pack a 10 car out in the car, hop out of the car, go catch a fish or two or three or seven and jump back to the store before it's time to open the doors. And I've already, you know, I've already found out what the fish were eating, already found out, you know, the activity levels, whether, you know, it's worth fishing there the next day, if we have customers coming in and out, whether they should go. And that's something that's really special is that throughout the Austin, you know, San Antonio, New Braunfels, you know, Round Rock area, Georgetown, even, there's a lot of rivers that kind of cross right underneath the interstate there that, you know, we have really great access and we're very much blessed with that in Texas.

6:47Yeah. And that actually kind of surprised me, just the kind of environment that we found there. Would you say that that's very unique to that area near New Braunfels, Round Rock, Austin? Or is that, can you find those kinds of beautiful streams pretty much throughout the great state of Texas? I like that you said great state. I'm not going to lie. I'm a little partial. The water quality in the central area of the state, to be honest, is really kind of pinnacle in the fact that it's kind of on the Edwards Plateau. You've got clear streams that flow over a limestone river bottom. So that's kind of unique as it pertains to the kind of western side and central portion of the state. As you head north and east, it's not that the streams aren't there. They're just typically not as clear, a little bit more of a muddy bottom in a lot of places. The fishing can still be very, very good in many of the creeks, even up through some of the Dallas Metroplex area. I have a lot of customers and friends up there that, you know, they do exactly that.

7:50They pack a tenkara rod or an ultralight fly rod in, and they're having a very similar experience to what you had, just in water that, you know, maybe isn't quite as pristine, isn't quite as clear in many cases. That's not obviously the rule, but it kind of is a little bit more dingy, a little bit more color to the water up there. The pristine environments that you see in the hill country are kind of unique to that kind of that hard rock bottom that we get throughout the central portion of the state. All right. So let's talk, since we're talking about geography right now, and then eventually I want to talk about fish species and that kind of thing. You had a presentation and I was able to catch a part of it at the Guadalupe Trout Unlimited Fest, the Trout Fest, where the title of your presentation is the Republic of Texas or Fly Fishing in the Republic of Texas. Tell us a little bit more about that Republic of Texas, because I think that's your unique thing, isn't it? Did you come up with that? So it's something that I didn't come up with the Republic of Texas. That's an older idea.

8:50But as far as the fly fishing, the Republic of Texas, it's something that, you know, for me, I spend a lot of my a lot of my time kind of yearning for southern Colorado, northern New Mexico. I love being in the mountains up there. And for me personally, I love chasing Rio Grande cutthroat trout. So for me, that's if there was ever a trout that was native to Texas, that was it. And we've got a little bit of historical record in the past that would kind of allude to that subject as well. We don't have any, you know, hard, fast proof, but it's just enough of a mystery to have some intrigue to it. For me, being able to kind of network what we do in the hill country with our small streams, ultralight fly fishing, you know, our vast array of, you know, smaller bass and panfish species. That networks so well to how we fish in southern Colorado and in northern New Mexico. and basically the Rio Grande River runs all the way up through the headwaters in southern Colorado. Anything on the north, kind of the north and western side of that, or excuse me, north and eastern side of that would have been the Republic of Texas, and then the western side would not have been.

9:59So we kind of connected the dots, and that presentation showed folks how to take what they do here, and when they travel west, whether they're fishing for, you know, cutthroat or not, whether it's, you know, brookies or browns or rainbows and high mountain streams. It was really neat to see the parallels between what we do in the hill country and matching the hatch and some of the fish habitat that you would find very similar, you know, holding lies and very similar even river habitat in places in the kind of the southern Rockies. Yeah, I think that's, you know, it's a very large state already and you kind of expand into fishing a little bit north and that kind of thing. So it's, yeah, with that, you can find an incredible variety of habitats in fish as well. And one thing that stuck with me was that you were mentioning that when you're fishing a lot in Texas, you know, you have access to the, you know, the cichlid, the bass, and the trout as well, of course.

11:01And every day, if you're fishing for a different species, you kind of have to adjust your technique. You have to set the hook in different ways. Why don't you tell us first a little bit about the, you briefly touched on it, the fish species that we can find around your area, around the Round Rock area. So I had a great time fishing primarily the Guadalupe bass, which is like a little smallmouth kind of bass, if you will. Maybe I'm going wrong, but why don't you tell us a little bit about the fish that you find and what the differences are between them and how you fish for them. Sure. And we'll talk a little bit kind of in regards to that. I mean, you did mention that obviously you came to Trout Fest. You were on the Guadalupe River. That is our only year round trout fishery in the state. So the challenge there is that our trout are quite large. I mean, the average fish getting caught out of that river this year is somewhere between like 17 and 20 inches, which those are very large tenkara targets. So that's a handful on a sato, but it can be done.

12:02And so for us, that's a whole nother challenge completely. When you look at our bass and sunfish, that's almost an entirely different skill set, not just in, you know, the presentation and retrieve, but also in habitat and understanding your species. So it's something I like to quote to a lot of people is a trout is a trout is a trout anywhere you go and just in the same vein, so is a bass. Anywhere you travel, a bass is a bass is a bass. There may be some idiosyncrasies and some, you know, kind of behavioral traits that very much separate a species from another. But the root cause of all those species, they are going to very much behave similarly. So you saw that with our Guadalupe bass, which is the state fish of Texas. It's actually closer to a spotted bass, oddly enough. There is not a single native smallmouth bass in the state. So this is one that's very unique to Texas. The Guadalupe bass only lives and exists in central Texas, only place on the earth that it does. And it is a prime fly rod target.

13:04But instead of, you know, dead drifting for trout like we do in that or even doing kind of like a tight line nymphing presentation or something of the sort, we're actually manipulating the fly quite a bit more. Bass don't eat dead things is kind of a popular saying around here that they are very much an apex predator. They're an ambush predator. They have a really good top speed when they're chasing bait fish, but they're also very opportunistic. We've caught fish. I think you realize that as well. Your largest fish of the trip was on a size 14 fly, so they're not going to miss an opportunity to eat. No, no, absolutely. Yeah, I caught fish in a lot of different ways. You go out a little bit bass. I caught one as soon as the fly landed. I did catch one just kind of like on a dead drift, but by far the most active was the, you know, pulling the fly, kind of giving it some kind of action as a bait fish, I think is what you were telling me to try to imitate. Yeah, and the Guadalupe bass, you taught me as well.

14:04It has this little red or little brown spot on the tongue. And I do have a photo of that that I'll post on the podcast page for this episode so that people can see one easy way to tell that it's a Guadalupe bass. So there's going to be a photo on the tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast on the Texas Tenkara episode. And you said at one point that the Guadalupe bass is virtually identical to another bass. Is that a spotter bass? The only surefire way to tell, and a lot of biologists will tell you this as well, you can't purely identify them based on appearance. And even biologists, it's very, very hard to go back and forth and say this one is and this one isn't. A lot of it depends on where they're located. So there are some rivers where they do coexist, and that makes it extremely difficult. But as it pertains to, you know, say like Brushy Creek, for instance, those fish are all Guadalupe bass. You look at, I mean, there may be a spotted or something, you know, east of town, you know, when the river gets a little bit wider.

15:09But throughout the hill country, the predominant species that you will find when you have a fish with that appearance is going to be the Guadalupe bass. And then the, can you like the little brown spot on the tongue, that's exclusive to the Guadalupe bass, right? The spotted bass also has that. So that's the one thing. The smallmouth and largemouth, though, do not. And so that's one of the things that if you're in an area with smallmouth, which there are a few rivers here that still have some of that, they will not have that tooth patch. So that kind of it's one of those differentiating qualities between those those species. And a lot of our largemouth, if they're hiding in heavy cover or in weeds, for instance, a lot of times they'll get more of a mottled appearance or their color will be very, very different. And we do have people that come in the shop all the time that confuse the two. And we just simply tell them, next time, look at the tongue, it's just a little brown, kind of brown to almost kind of a light tan tooth patch right there on the tongue. And you can feel it, you can see it, and it really helps you confirm the species identity. Got it. Nice.

16:13In terms of all this fish, so let's talk a little bit about, so we talked a little bit about Texas as a whole. But let's say for people, a lot of people are coming through Austin on a business trip, and maybe they have a few hours that they can spare to try to explore the hill country or the fishing waters around there. If somebody is visiting Austin for a business trip, how long at a minimum do you think they need to come and fish with you? I mean, as far as going fishing in general, you don't need all that long. If you were wanting to book a guide trip, per se, the shortest hour amount that we do is a half day, just because by the time we get out there and you see that water, you're going to fall in love with it. But if you need to just squeeze in some fishing time, that can be done fairly easily, especially in Austin. I mean, you have creeks like Barton Creek that are right there near downtown. And a lot of people, when they go to meetings, they're kind of in that part of the world. There's Bull Creek that runs through town. There's a number of really pristine, very beautiful creeks that run, you know, really kind of right through or adjacent to Austin proper.

17:20But then when you get outside of Austin, you'll find, you know, things like the San Gabriel River and Brushy Creek that are literally in some cases 20 minutes, 25 minutes away. So that's really not a bad, a bad quick drive to those those creeks to go spend some time. And if you don't want to pack the wet wading gear or the waders or anything like that, some of these rivers and creeks actually do have sufficient bank access to where if you didn't want to pack all the other paraphernalia to make it happen, they do offer you some shots at species that are very unique to the hill country like the Rio Grande Cichlid and the Guadalupe Bass, and in many cases without ever getting your feet wet. nice um yeah i suspect like maybe some people come in and they want to get uh you know a little bit of fishing in they can easily pack it and cut a rod and they carry on and uh maybe come visit uh chris at uh the the living waters fly shop in round rocks and uh how long of a it's not very far from austin right it's like what 25 minute drive from traffic if there's no traffic it's probably you know 15 to 20 minutes somewhere in there it's probably 20 minutes uh into downtown area. If there is traffic, that can be a vastly different number. Yeah, nice. Well, and this episode is coming right after the last two episodes that I recorded for the Tenkara Cast.

18:41And I think the timing is good because one of the more recent episodes was warm water Tenkara. We mostly talked about panfish, different techniques for that. So I recorded that with Bart Lombardo from Panfish on the Fly. And then the last episode, I talked about really what is Tenkara, you know, because the definition of Tenkara is oftentimes hotly debated. You know, it's a method of fishing that has been around for a very long time, primarily done in mountain streams in Japan for trout. But of course, as it kind of gets adopted here in the States, We adapted to different things, tried to fish for different species. And I will tell you that when we were fishing outside of Round Rock, even though we were catching bass and pinfish, I always felt like I was tenkara fishing, or for the most part, until he started throwing me some very heavy flies. But for the most part, it was like, oh, this is like a mountain streams, and I was casting some lightweight flies, and I was catching some fish that way.

19:43But why don't you tell us a little bit about your techniques when you use a tenkara rod out there. Um, what, uh, what is a typical setup and technique that you like to use? For me personally, I mean, exactly what you were saying, where you're adapting what you've learned or even what you've seen or heard about, uh, from mountain stream fishing. Uh, it's very similar in many cases here. So, um, on Brushy Creek, I'll just kind of use it as the textbook example, uh, just simply because you were, you were there, you saw what happened. And then in addition to that, um, our insect hatches on Brushy Creek are some of the best in the hill country. Like you can actually regularly plan on anticipating a hatch and being there when it comes off. And there's a variety of insect species. So if you take kind of that trout background, and if you bring your trout game to Central Texas, at least in the small creeks, there's not a whole lot of change when it comes to some of our smaller bass and panfish species. When you start going to, you know, the bass arena, that's where we start imitating, you know, more bait fish. There's going to be a little bit more motion involved in some of the presentations. And then we even, you know, imitate things like crawfish. We threw a few crayfish patterns throughout the day. And that actually produced quite well, especially on that first section of the creek that we went to. And that's the example of where the flies become a little bit weighted is because we're having to, you know, reach depths that a typical tenkara fly would not get to just because in the cooler months, that's where the fish are. In the warmer of months you don't have to put nearly as much weight on there and a lot of times you're able to fish directly in the water column and in many cases traditional tenkara patterns work quite well yeah and it's you know we'll tell you know our listeners i did use heavy flies it's kind of a unusual as people who have read articles that i've written or listened to this podcast fast i usually don't wait use weighted flies i like to use the currents to take the fly deep for me but mostly like in some of the areas that we were fishing there was very calm like not very fast running water and the fly had to get deep really fast and i always admitted that's one of the limitations on not using weight is that you know i cannot get my fly deep fast you know i could kind of get it deep but it takes a while but yeah the real effective way was to use heavier flies that were going to go down deep pretty quickly.

22:13And I think trying to remember the names of the flies. So I remember the name of the fly that I caught my last bass of the day, which was the largest one. It was, I don't even know how big it was. I think it was probably close to three pounds. And yeah, and that was a real getter. Very good friend of mine, Matt Bennett. He actually has his own commercial fly company that he does. He's a custom tire. He started Fly Geek Custom Flies, and he's the originator behind that pattern. And it produces amazingly well through the hill country. I love that pattern for a lot of our pan fish, but it's amazing how many bass eat that as well. So Fly Geek Custom Flies? I think his website is flygeek.net. Just an absolutely fantastic tire. He actually used to work here at Living Waters. He worked here alongside me for several years. We're still real good friends. And, man, his patterns have more than established their place in the hill country of Texas.

23:15Yeah, I'll make sure. I'll try to find a photo of the real getter and put a link to his website in exchange so people see what we're talking about. I'll put it on this podcast page. uh but yeah that fly worked pretty well for for the very large bass but i got some smaller small mouth actually earlier um and uh or large mouth actually and um i also caught the guadalupe bass and a couple of panfish on it as well so it kind of uh but it's the real getter because it's primarily designed for the the real grand ciclo the fly was originally created um he he handed me a prototype way back in the day. And he said, here, this is what I thought it for a Rio Grande cichlid fly. And I fished it and caught bass on it, caught cichlids on it, caught sunfish on it. And I know he was doing the same. And the thing that was really neat about it, we made just a few adjustments. I made a couple of recommendations. He made the changes and the fly now rides hook up to where it doesn't get snagged on the bottom. We're able to leave it at rest in front of a fish, which one of the traits of a Rio Grande cichlid is they'll very often get next to a fly and kind of stare it down a lot of times. And so the ability to have a fly that can rest on the bottom, it has some chickaboo, kind of a marabou type material in the fly that moves while it rests.

24:35So it's just, it's an incredibly productive fly. And the tails are tied very short as well. And that's one of the things that's kind of one of the little secrets behind that fly is cichlids a lot of times will pick up a fly by the tail because they don't actually suck in a fly like a bass or a sunfish does. Bass are actually members of the sunfish family. Cichlids are their own unique family. In fact, the Rio Grande cichlid is the only native cichlid to the U.S. There's no other one like it. So it's very unique in that fact. Like it's close cousins with like the tilapia and peacock bass. That's kind of the general family there if you wanted to kind of look at what family of fish it's in. So its feeding habits, you know, aren't too incredibly different, but the way that they pick up a fly is very, very different than some of our sunfish and bass. Interesting. And I will mention too to our listeners that we did catch a decent number of fish on a Tenkara flies. Actually, John, I believe he landed, I think he said it was his largest bass on tenkara using a tenkara fly i believe um he might have been yeah i think he was using like a ishigaki or something like that i'll ask john later put on those on the website and i and soon after he lost his biggest fish uh which would have been his bigger one on a tenkara flies as well so you know the tenkara flies did work but as he did mention you know in the cooler months i mean we were astounded that we were fishing as well as we did for how cold it had been in the month of February.

26:12But yeah, usually in the summer months, you'll do very well on the Tenkara fly, Chris mentioned. In the winter months there, maybe you have to go a little deeper, a little bit bigger to stimulate a strike. But yeah, so the Tenkara flies will work as well. And Chris and people in his shop can point you to other flies that will work when things are kind of tough. I'm not going to interrupt, but one of the things that I think really kind of adds to that, If you still want to stay with a traditional Tenkara fly, a lot of people, you know, the level lines that are made, they're fluorocarbon typically is the material that they're made out of. And a lot of times I will change from a nylon or monofilament tippet to a fluorocarbon tippet to gain a little extra depth because fluorocarbon, for one, obviously it goes transparent in the water, which is fantastic in our clear water to kind of give you that added advantage. But then number two, it also sinks. It's a denser material. it does have a little bit of a sink rate to it. And the thing that's really special about that for us is that we're able to get the fly a little bit deeper, even if the fly doesn't have as much inherent weight based on the way it was tied.

27:19Yeah, and sometimes, you know, making the adjustment can definitely mean the difference between a strike and not getting a fish. You know, I always say, like, I'm a devout one-fly angler when it comes to trout, you know, especially in moving water where they don't have a ton of time to make their decision. They're just trying to grab whatever is coming at them. But I'm not a bass angler, so I definitely rely on people with more experience like Chris to kind of tell me what to do when I go in those situations. Sometimes I will fish for them here at home, you know, in the ponds and a couple of canals that we have here in Boulder. But I'm not generally a bass guy. I definitely have a lot to learn when it comes to that, I think. um and uh tell me a little bit about brushy creek it seems like that's kind of like the big you know water that people like to to fish there and there's a map that you just published right when i was visiting uh of brushy creek so it's not a secret um and uh is that uh is that like a favorite water or there's just a bunch of other waters that i just didn't hear as much about so many rivers across the hill country. We, I mean, you could start just dropping names like the San Marcus and the Blanco and the Guadalupe and the Colorado and the Nueces, the Sabinol, the Devils.

28:36And there's so many more that we have access to in the hill country, but Brushy Creek is special to me in the fact that for one, it flows right through the heart of my hometown. I grew up in Round Rock and for me, it was where I learned to fly fish. It was the, it was the river that when I learned, I was down there, you know, whether I rode my bike to it, whether the parents dropped me off, whatever, whatever happened there, I was just, I was learning on Brushy Creek and its tributaries all throughout Round Rock through most of my childhood. And the, I tell folks, it's a lot in the guiding arena. I said, Brushy Creek is the Creek that I have fished the longest out of the waters that we guide. And it's still the one that intimidates me the most because, because the fish can do anything. I mean, we've had, it's the only place in the state I've ever watched a sunfish refuse a size 20 fly. And I mean, when they're on a hatch and they're eating something small, they'll, they get just as finicky as trout sometimes. And it's one of the things that limits people's success on the creek is they're not willing to make those changes to let the fish tell them what they want. Instead, we kind of try to force the fish to eat something they're not interested in. So if I listen to the fish and if I learn from them as kind of my teachers, then that Creek makes a whole lot more sense. But it's a special creek. And the fact that the Chisholm Trail used to cross it when they were doing all the cattle drives, it's a 69 mile body of water, actually, before it converges downstream with the San Gabriel. And the thing that's very, very rich in history, it's got the rock in the middle of downtown Round Rock. It's the Round Rock itself was the trail marker. So it was the rock that named the town, if you will.

30:13in the city of Round Rock actually used to be named Brushy Creek before they changed the name to Round Rock. Interesting. Very cool. It's just really near and dear. The map that we came out with was just just to show people where accesses are and to kind of open up that fishery as I mean, a lot of people already fly fish it because the shop is here and we point people that direction. But we just wanted people to be able to find the accesses that they haven't been able to find before because the more people that fish it, the more people love it. And we just get a whole another group of very, very devout conservationists to help protect and conserve and really cherish that creek. And that's going to happen through people that love it and fish it because lovers will always work harder than workers. And you do a couple of cleanups there. We do a brush and clean up. That's actually coming up here pretty quick. We normally couple that with some sort of little hangout at the shop after the fact. But yeah, we do cleanups. We do a lot of stuff there. We even helped when they were doing some Guadalupe bass sampling to find out the genetics on those fish, if they were pure or not, which it turned out that they were.

31:22We actually were able to kind of help come alongside some of the state agencies and collect some fish for their studies as well. So we do whatever we can in partnership with the creek to make sure that it still stays on the map, but then also it's something that we are very much devoted to protecting as a shop. When is the cleanup coming up in case anybody's listening to it and they can help you guys out? Is it, do you know what the date is? I don't have a single clue because I have looked at so many dates lately. I know we're about, we're about to update our events page. It'll be listed on our website. We have an events page on there. So it's just livingwatersflyfishing.com slash events. If you go there, we'll have all the information for, you know, all the, the brushy Creek cleanup. And then we also have a little, a little just for fun tournament that we do on it. That's actually a multi-species tournament, uh, because there's over a dozen species that you can catch, uh, at the drop of a hat. And we've even done a, uh, Tenkara division in that a few times. So that's really fun. Oh yeah. Cool. Nice. Uh, so yeah, for our listeners who are anywhere, uh, near Texas at a time should try to go there with the Tenkara rod and catch a bunch of different species. You'll have a blast. It's a lot of fun.

32:30well and uh i think i might have covered pretty much all that i wanted to talk about but of course we cannot stop a conversation about fishing in texas without talking about the barbecue of texas so there's a there's a couple of things that uh i think you mentioned that i had to do when i went fishing with you one of them was we started the day with donuts and you guys have a texas at at least Texas famous donut shop right across from your shop. It's really funny. The only thing that my that my city is actually famous for, like I would say the predominant thing anyway, is our donuts. And that seems like a very unlikely thing to be famous for. But I can assure you they are very much worth it. The the back of the fly shop actually faces the place. It's called Round Rock Donuts or Lone Star Bakery. It goes by both names. they they see I think it's almost a million unique visitors a year or something like that I forget the numbers it's something just astronomical but every store event that we do up here at the fly shop we go buy a bunch of donuts and bring it up here so people can listen to fly fishing talk and eat the donuts but they are they are something to have they're they're just absolutely incredibly good and we have a sign on the back of the fly shop that faces the donut shop that says fly fish round rock because more people are going to see the sign on the back of our building than they were the front.

33:57That's funny. Yeah, I love that. I think I had like, actually, it was funny because I think you asked me how many donuts I had and I was like, oh, I had three. And you're like, no, I'm pretty sure you had four. And I think I did because I did have a little bit of a sugar rush a couple of times. I went back and recounted just to make sure. And yeah, it was four. You definitely put away four. That is respectable at all. They were good. but but for lunch you know to kind of counteract all the sugar we had some really good protein and uh yeah i was uh you know i couldn't leave texas without having my share of barbecue and i i thought it was phenomenal what was the name of the place that we went to a place that's located many places throughout texas it's a chain uh called rudy's it's rudy's country store and barbecue it's there's a number of them throughout the state and they might even actually have a few in multi-states now. I'm not sure. But Rudy's is just very consistent. Any one of them you go to, the barbecue is really good. So I mean, the things everybody's kind of got their, you know, buzz topics. It's like, oh my gosh, don't talk about religion. Don't talk about politics. Well, if you wanted to throw a barbecue in that, then that would be kind of the other one that Texans have all the opinions about. So everybody's got their opinion on where's the best. And I'm not going to say that, you know, any one of them is just because I don't want to get like, you know, berated after this podcast but i'm sure rudy's is very consistent and what you witnessed is that when you walk to the counter and you've never been there they call you a rookie but then they give you all these samples so for you that worked out in your favor yeah that was uh that was really good there's a lot of different types of uh a few different options that i had never seen before i think you guys had a distinction between the was a wet brisket and uh regular brisket and moist and then there's a cutter's choice too so they've got three there that you uh yeah yeah some people just serve brisket yeah that's that's kind of lame you need to have a differentiation of uh whether you know you want it with uh you can even say extra moist do you want it with flavor or without nice yeah no that was terrific and it's uh it's actually kind of lunch time right now here and i'm my mouth is completely watering maybe i shouldn't have started talking about barbecue because now i have to stop the podcast yeah if our listeners start listening to a saliva sound here you know and drooling that's uh that's why um well chris it was a it was a real pleasure to fish with you uh when i got to visit um and i'll post some of the photos that i that we took on the tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast page for this episode so you see photos of the fish that we caught uh and i will post a link uh to the shop as well and to the flies that or at least one of the flies i remember using if if anybody's curious uh but thank you so much for introducing more tenkara anglers to uh to the tenkara fishing in texas which sometimes people can overlook but i i had a great experience you finally made it to texas it's been a it's been an honor to carry the brand and to be part of the guide network and i cannot thank you enough for what you've done for the the sport of tenkara angling and then also So, you know, just really what you've done for fly fishing in Texas.

37:09It's really been a very special niche to fill. And I know it's kind of a divisive topic depending on where you talk about it. But for here, I just think it has literally been an answer for so many of the problems that we have. And then I tell people all the time, I'm like, if fly fishing is my hatchet, then tenkara is my scalpel. It allows me to go places and do things that I might not otherwise be able to do. So thank you so much for bringing it to Texas. wow i i like that so if fly fishing is my hatchet tenkara is my scalpel i like that you're full of great quotes chris i appreciate those i'm gonna start seeing those written all over the place and be like yeah i remember that thank you very much for listening to the Tenkara Cast i'd like to extend a special thank you to nick ogawa also known as Takenobu check out his music at takenobumusic.com we'll be posting links to any references we made in this podcast such as Takenobu's music on our website, www.tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast.

38:12And until next time on the Tenkara Cast.