James Gill
Matt Sment handles his slender, 12-foot-long fishing rod like an extension of his arm. With a deft flick of the wrist, he presents a tiny cluster of feathers surrounding a minuscule hook as if it had just fallen from the sky. Turns out that the Japanese word for “from the heavens” is tenkara. Tenkara is also the name for a form of fishing developed in the Japanese Alps.
Because the first tenkara anglers were too busy fishing to write anything down about it, no one knows when Japanese anglers figured out they could imitate insects using feathers and hair. At any rate, someone took a long piece of bamboo, attached a line and a lure, and started experimenting. These were commercial fishermen, not dandy sportsmen, so if they failed, they didn’t eat.
Today, many anglers are attracted to tenkara because it focuses on the fishing and technique rather than the equipment, as has become so often the case with Western fly fishing.
While the geology of the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin is a haven and hotspot for fly fishing, many area residents don’t take advantage of it — daunted, perhaps, by the complex culture surrounding Western fly fishing. Tenkara focuses on nature. The basics. Oddly enough, this ancient form of Japanese fly fishing could be the passport to get Wisconsinites into the sport.
Sment has become one of tenkara’s key ambassadors and promoters, guiding kids, newcomers and experienced anglers, and even starting his own rod company.
“There is a tenkara community, and I strive to be a positive force,” says Sment. “I want to bring enthusiasm and use my influence to bring in young anglers, and people intimidated by the complexity of fly fishing, and to get people connected with the outdoors.”
Gone fishin’
I meet up with Sment on a stretch of Black Earth Creek that runs close to Cross Plains on a sunny but breezy day. I want to see for myself how he developed his passion for tenkara. I did not plan, no pun intended, on getting hooked myself.
Standing behind his Jeep, Sment hands me a small rod, the weight of which astonishes me. Sment must see the look on my face. (For the record, I do not play poker.) He grins and says “That one weighs 2 ounces.”
Two ounces. That’s the same weight as half a stick of butter. Talk about minimalist.
You might expect to fork over a stack of bills for something this delicate, but tenkara rods cost less than $200. They don’t have reels. And because they telescope, they collapse to fewer than 20 inches and fit into a little tube case.
The last conventional fly rod I bought cost close to $500; handmade rods can go for thousands. My reel was another $150, and that’s a middle-of-the-road model, not a handmade English reel. Those will Hoover Benjamins out of your wallet like a car wash vacuum. Tenkara is austere and economical. I can get used to this.
Then we went fishing.
Sment ties a tiny fly on my leader — the Pink Squirrel, a pattern invented by Driftless Area trout fishing legend John Bethke. “No one knows exactly how it works,” says Sment. “It doesn’t exactly mimic anything; it just looks like a big fat snack a trout would love.” Trout don’t feed like pelagic fish, cruising along looking for something to munch. They sit in the calm water behind a rock and wait for the food to come to them.
I was using a rod from Sment’s own company, Badger Tenkara. The U.N.C. (it stands for Un-Named Creek) is his least expensive model and is delightful, perfect for all the unnamed creeks I want to explore.
Tenkara employs a slightly modified casting technique from Western fly fishing, but it wasn’t too hard to adjust. After a while, Sment says, “Well, you get it. Consider yourself trained.” It’s at that point I cast right over the only obstruction in the river and break off the fly. I blame the wind, but it’s really just a lapse in concentration.
Originally from Rockford, Illinois, Sment is a quiet, affable man, except when he starts talking about fishing. Then his speech accelerates and takes on an infectious enthusiasm. This is a man who loves what he does.
Sment, 43, has lived all over the U.S., including stints in California, Louisiana and Colorado. Once a U.S. Army cavalry scout, Sment was never deployed, but instead became an OPFOR (opposing force) trainer, playing the “bad guy” in war and disaster simulations. Then, after working for seven years as a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security, writing and producing training events for large-scale disasters and terrorist attacks, he decided it was time to move on.
“I was in a world preparing people for combat,” says Sment. “When the time came for me to leave, I gravitated to the outdoors.”
Sment was already a backpacker and fly-fisher when his friend, Mike Lutes, suggested he try tenkara fishing as a complement to his ultra-light backpacking. The attraction was immediate. “I didn’t catch a fish my first time out, but everything about the experience struck a chord with me. I ordered a rod that same day.” Lutes is now his partner in Badger Tenkara.
Sment loves tenkara because it keeps him “immersed in the experience with the fewest possible distractions. Without fiddling with gear, I’m focused and fully in the moment.” Badger Tenkara’s motto is “Fish more, fuss less.”
Two hours pass in what feels like half an hour. I’m so focused on precisely placing the fly where I want it I have no choice other than to fully concentrate. Tenkara is excellent head medicine.
Radical simplicity
It was the British diplomat Sir George Satow, an avid mountaineer who spent two decades in Japan, who wrote the first Western account of what was probably tenkara.
Satow used the wilderness as a salve to help him mitigate the stress of a diplomatic career. Big changes were afoot in 1870s Japan, and we know from Satow’s 47-volume diary and letters that he was immersed in nature as much as his career would allow. When he was in the office, his letters often mention his desire to be outside.
He discovered tenkara fishing while in the Japanese Alps. “July 24, 1878: Last night we had for dinner capital fish called iwana, caught in the Kurobegawa with a fly made of cock’s feathers, weighing about 3/4 lbs. Our coolies were provided with bamboo rods and flies to fish for iwana in a stream near Kamidaki.”
James Gill
Matt Sment: With tenkara, he’s “immersed and fully in the moment.”
It took more than a century after Satow’s account for tenkara to make it to the United States. Sment says the sport began to be more popular during the mid- to late-2000s; in 2009, Daniel W. Galhardo founded Tenkara USA. Modern tenkara technique hasn’t moved too far from the old ways; its simplicity is its biggest attraction. You need just four items to catch fish: a rod, a line, a leader and a fly (or kebari).
Original tenkara rods were bamboo. The rod maker kept to bamboo in its natural form, using heat and gentle flexing to make slight adjustments to the bamboo cane.
Modern tenkara rods are often made of carbon. They’re telescopic with a cork handle, and fit into a tube a little longer than the core of a roll of paper towels.The floating line is attached to the tip of the rod, and a smaller piece of leader is attached to that. Tie on a fly, and that’s it. Other than spearing a fish, it’s as elemental as fishing gets.
Then there are the flies. Western anglers choose from hundreds of varieties, with colorful and enigmatic names like Parachute Adams, Woolly Bugger and my favorite, Yellow Humpy. A skilled tenkara angler may use only two or three fly patterns to mimic a trout’s favorite dinner. This is the opposite of the obsessive Western trout angler’s desperate efforts to “match the hatch.” With tenkara, the idea is just to mimic things that look like food; don’t worry if it resembles what’s hatching. Sment fits his whole arsenal of flies into an Altoids tin with a little foam glued in the back.
Tenkara flies are attractors, not imitators. “The idea that a specific fly is supposed to be a specific insect is a Western idea,” says Sment. “A kebari is designed to be used with a specific technique or set of techniques. As unweighted wet flies, they let you play in the top six to eight inches of the water.” Using different techniques, a skilled tenkara angler mimics behaviors that cause a fish to strike.
Kebari are also different from Western flies in that they have a reverse hackle. Picture an umbrella that has been blown inside out. Working the kebari in that top layer of water, the angler can cause that reverse hackle to pulse, by opening and closing the hackle. I ask why it works, and Sment shrugs: “Well, I guess it looks buggy.”
Sment usually sticks to traditional tenkara flies and techniques, but he does adapt to local waters, as Driftless Area streams are different from the swift streams of the Japanese Alps.
“Each pool or creek can be approached like a puzzle,” he says. “When you first look at it you pause and think about how you approach it, where to cast, where do you think the fish will be, what technique you’ll use. Then you have to put it all together to make it work. There are hundreds of small variables that must happen to get that fish into your hands. You have to manage your shadow on the approach. You have to walk quietly so you don’t spook the fish, you have to cast skillfully, then you have to get the fish on the hook and play it to the net or your hand. It’s a cycle.”
Catching on
The Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin is a mecca for trout anglers. I grew up fishing bigger western rivers, and I assumed the warm water here would dissuade trout from getting a finhold. How wrong I was.
Driftless creeks are spring-fed limestone creeks, and water coming out of these springs is a chilly 55 degrees. Driftless geology creates a nutrient-rich environment where insects and crustaceans thrive. It’s a trout smorgasbord.
It’s surprising that some of streams are so small. Thousands of miles of fertile fishing streams in southwestern Wisconsin are so small you could jump over some of them with a good running start. Small streams are more protected from the sun, so the water stays colder, and the plants and rocks that shade the water from the sun create an ideal environment. The terrain means that casting is complex. Finding solitude is not a problem.
James Gill
Clubs such as Trout Unlimited have funded and participated in streambank remediation to improve fisheries in the Driftless. Degraded banks and poor erosion-control practices are being reversed by Trout Unlimited’s efforts to shore up vulnerable spots and create the clear, silt-free water that trout love. The local clubs work with farmers to create best practices to keep streams gin clear. Many Trout Unlimited members aren’t even anglers; they join because they care about water quality.
The Driftless is an ideal place to practice tenkara, and enough people are interested in learning it to have allowed Sment to quit his day job.
Sment and Lutes started Badger Tenkara, one of a handful of U.S.-based companies that make tenkara rods and equipment, in 2014. They sell several different rods they’ve designed, all in the $100 range.
Sment is a tenkara guide in the Driftless, and also spends a lot of time on the phone talking to customers about what kind of equipment they might need, and “helping them get dialed in.”
Matt Wagner, co-owner of the Driftless Angler, the respected fly-fishing shop in Viroqua, says that there is significant interest in tenkara among his customers. “There is definitely more awareness,” says Wagner. The Driftless Angler carries Badger Tenkara rods, and when customers want to learn more, the shop often sends them to Sment and Lutes.
Sment sees a clear growth of interest in the sport. “There are more events and clinics nationwide, and I get more frequent requests to speak and present at trade shows,” he says.
Sment says he and Lutes feel that some American tenkara practitioners are presenting the sport in an “overly specific and overly traditional” way. “Yes, we certainly respect the origins, but there’s more opportunities than just fishing for trout on mountain streams,” Sment says. “In Wisconsin, we have spring creeks, warm water streams, lakes, ponds and all sorts of different species in them. We want to adapt tenkara to all types of fishing.”
His other mission is to make tenkara accessible to all. “We needed to bring the price down without sacrificing quality. Anglers won’t experiment with a new technique using a $300 rod, so we kept our prices low. People will try new things if it won’t break the bank.”
Sment and Lutes developed a tenkara rod for the Boy Scouts that would work in most fishing conditions that a scout might encounter. Last month, he spent a week teaching tenkara techniques to Boy Scouts at the National Jamboree in West Virginia.
Sment is convinced this is a natural pathway to get more kids fishing: “It’s simple, it’s inexpensive and it’s fun.” He particularly enjoys teaching kids from large cities who would never otherwise take up fly fishing. “These Scouts from New York had never held a rod, and after half an hour, they were catching fish,” he says. Sment is also involved in rewriting the curriculum for the Boy Scout fly fishing merit badge to include tenkara.
Additionally, Sment participated in and donated tenkara rods to Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, which introduces disabled military service personnel and veterans to fly fishing as an aid to emotional healing, and Kids on the Fly, a program in Baraboo that introduces kids to fly fishing.
However, the largest growth of new users comes from people who are involved in other outdoor pastimes, says Sment, people who enjoy hiking, paddling and cycling, “but who want to keep things light and simple.”
I could have spent all day practicing, despite only a few strikes (I missed both), but it was soothing to just throw flies to the hidden trout. In the end, I bought a U.N.C., and it has a place under the seat of my truck. I have a tiny spool of leader, a pill bottle full of flies and my fishing license in the glove compartment.
I don’t have a lot of spare time for a new hobby, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Tenkara seems like the perfect meditative activity to do on the way home from work. Just an hour, dropping flies from the heavens.
Matt Sment can be contacted at fishon@badgertenkara.com. He guides all over southern Wisconsin, especially the Driftless Area. For more information about the equipment, see badgertenkara.com.
