Yesterday I took 10-year old Sofi tenkara fishing for her first time. She emailed me last week to ask if I could teach her tenkara for her “Dream Homework” assignment. On Monday she attended a presentation I gave at the Boulder REI. It was real cool to see how interested and engaged she was.
While fishing, what impressed me the most was how intuitive she was. I gave her a rod and just told her to get her tenkara fly “out there”, pointing to the calm water near some currents. She did in less than a minute with no instruction. A few minutes later, she spontaneously started manipulating the fly – and she did it perfectly too. It was quite astounding. The fishing was pretty slow, I believe because of pressure changes, but she did manage to land a nice brown within 15 minutes of us picking up the rod for the first time.