Tenkara Basics: Introducing the Fundamentals of Tenkara

THE TENKARA MASTER CLASS WITH PAT JAEGER

INTRODUCTION
There is a kind of freedom in simplicity. A long collapsible rod, a fixed line, no reel. Just the angler, the fly, and the water in front of them.

For more than 30 years, veteran Eastern Sierra guide Pat Jaeger has built his life around understanding moving water, fish behavior, and the small adjustments that separate a cast from a catch. In this master class, Pat begins with the foundations: what a tenkara rod is, how it works, and how to set it up, before moving into rigging, reading water, presentation, and casting. But this is more than a lesson in technique. It's a study in simplicity.

This is the Tenkara Master Class with Pat Jaeger.


PAT'S APPROACH
Hey, my name is Pat Joerger. I'm a fly fishing guide up here in the Eastern Sierra. My approach with the tenkara rod is to simplify the world of fly fishing. My goal is to spend an hour with somebody and have the light bulb turn on, and then get an email the next day saying they caught fish, not saying that they can't fish without me. So my techniques came organically, to show people how to do this simply.


WHAT IS TENKARA?
Tenkara is a telescoping rod with a fixed amount of line on the end, and it enables you to cast basically a 20-foot leader. Well, why would we ever want to do that? Because it'll land our fly on the river like a flower petal: very, very light.

So for you Western fly fishermen, it isn't going to hurt your game. This will be a tool for your arsenal. With every style of fly fishing and fishing that we adapt ourselves to, the better fisherman we'll be.


OPENING AND CLOSING THE ROD
For you gadget guys who like to fly fish, this is a really weird contraption. This is a telescoping rod. It's like a piece of cotton candy. It just weighs nothing.

We open this up. The cap you'll usually lose, so put it in a place that you find to be your stash spot for the caps. The very end of this rod comes with a little tiny piece that looks like a red worm, almost. We call it Lillian.

Here's how I open it. I'm right-handed, so I put the rod under my left side. I pour it out and grab the red end. Watch out for ceiling fans, and watch out for your buddy's eyes. I simply pull this through a pinched finger and put tension on it. Every time I hit a little junction, I put a little tug on it. As you can see, right now I'm only using two inches. I'm not doing big long strips. If we do these little tiny ones, it will work just perfect.

And that's a 12-foot fly rod right there.

The really important part is how to retract it, because this is when people break their rods. It's the big reach up that will get you. What you want to do is go to the first junction and, easily, just a couple of inches at a time, work it back down. Now, this is a 12-foot fly rod. You could get a little bored doing this and want to get in a hurry. You might reach up, and the skinnier the section, the worse it gets.

If you find yourself with a jammed piece, one that doesn't feel like you can get it in, push it all the way down. Grab as close as you can to that very piece and push nice and tight, straight down an inch or two. If you go way up, you'll break it, because by the time you get to this end, the rod tip is the size of a pencil lead. If you go up there to push it down, you'll bust the tip off. It has to come straight down. No turns. So again, if you have a jammed piece, push it all the way down until it stops, get close to it, and then lever down on it. Make sure it goes all the way inside. Put your cap on and you're done.


FISHING WITH ONE HAND
One of the true loves I found with tenkara was this: people actually fish with two hands. As a teacher, I like to establish a one-handed style. I call it "handcuffed." As a guide, I find I can teach one hand pretty easily, and I don't want the other hand sabotaging the performance of the fisherman. So one hand is the fisherman, and the other is the helper.

Why? Because you can't grab this rod with the other hand. There's nothing to grab. There's no reel. So it's a really organic, easy way to teach fly fishing.


PRECISE PRESENTATION
One of the coolest parts of tenkara that I've noticed, with a fixed line, is that you can pick up your fly and put it down again. In the Western world, when you pick up your fly and put it down, and you're short by six inches, the guy usually pulls out about two feet of line. In the tenkara world, when we miss by six inches, we pick up, throw it down again, and take a six-inch step. That's all we do. So it's very precise casting, a very precise approach. If we need to go to the right, we turn our shoulders to the right. If we need to go to the left, we turn our shoulders to the left.


TENKARA'S ORIGINS
One of the key things to understand about tenkara is that it was designed to put fish on the table in Japan a long time ago. The first time I cast a tenkara rod, it was deadly. It's a really long pocketwater-style rod that I think you'll really like as a Western fly fisherman trying this out.