Successful trout fishing is knowing where to go, when, and what to do when you get there. These three can constitute a life-long journey of discovery. Done well, there is no final destination, no graduation, in either tenkara or trout.
At the start of the learning curve, faith and determination are useful allies, given that success with a tenkara stick can take some time. This is especially true for someone new to any sort of fly fishing, fixed or long line. Some frustratingly thin times can last for months (or even years), until all of our practice and our trials & errors finally ‘click’ to success. I had the luck and privilege to be present the day this happened to my girlfriend Corina, and it was a joy to watch.
As you may know from some of my previous posts to Tenkara Angler, Corina was fortunate to grow up in the Swiss Alps, within earshot of the clear, tumbling current of the upper Rhine River – more of a wide shallow stream near her village. Corina found her way to tenkara through me (and I have Matt Sment to thank for my entry to fixed lines).
One day while visiting her in 2019, about a year after tenkara got its hooks into me, she and I looked down at the river from a bridge just a short walk from her house. The Rhine here is one of the most beautiful streams I’ve ever seen – brilliantly clear, and flowing with steady music over and around stones polished by its glacial meltwater. I thought and said out loud, “This must be trout water.” At the time neither one of us knew much about trout in the Alps, but water like this would surely have wild trout if the trout had anything to do with it. And it wasn’t long before my tenkara rods and I confirmed that indeed it did – beautiful, pale jade native browns – a match to the gorgeous water in which they live.
Corina grew up in something of a “Heidi” childhood in the Alps – foraging in summer and fall with her mother for wild blueberries, lingonberries and mushrooms, and in spring helping her aunt and uncle lead their dairy cows up to a summer mountain pasture (an “alp”). She was keen to try a new way of exploring her beloved mountain home for sustenance – trout by tenkara. On one of my next visits I outfitted her with a DRAGONtail Mutant, some #3 Shimotsuke level line and showed her the basics.
What followed for her were the usual frustrations and occasional small successes while learning all the where-and-what-to-do things: the basics of casting, then reading water, a stealthy approach, fly presentation, strike detection, hook set, landing. These learnings and these skills progress roughly in parallel, through fits, starts, and all those back casts into trees. Early in my own tenkara going I considered an outing successful if the number of trout I caught exceeded flies lost (and some days that still holds!). But if we stick at it, the skills eventually coalesce into a tipping point of success. Corina’s tipping point came last summer.
After her first couple of seasons of catching more birch trees and willows than trout, she and I went to fish a beautiful tributary of the upper Rhine not far from her home. By this time her skills with her Mutant had advanced to where it looked like she was doing pretty much the same things I was on a stream, but I typically out-fished her by five and sometimes ten trout to one (rather like a role reversal of my fishing with Rob Worthing…).
In her first two seasons only a couple of the trout she caught were above the minimum legal keeper length. As we worked upstream this day, we came to a stunningly beautiful, deep pool, she had a go at it, and bam!, a hefty trout slammed her nymph. She worked it well, kept it away from strong currents, but it pulled off before she could net it. And friends, she was NOT pleased. No anodyne take of ‘it’s all good, there’ll be another one, another day’. Watching from across the stream I could see she took it hard, and she wasn’t just crestfallen, she was mad. And I thought to myself, “this is good, she really wants this.” Her anger was a reflection of desire and determination.
Ten minutes later, at the next pool upstream, she was on to another good fish. She worked it well again, and this time successfully. I caught on video the moment she brought it to net, took a look at the fish, and signaled, ‘Hell yeah it’s a keeper!’.
It was indeed a fine fish for these small, cold waters, a 13-inch brown, and in fact the largest trout either one of us had yet caught in the Alps.
Then a funny thing happened. Shortly after her catch, we drove upstream a few miles to spend what remained of the afternoon working another stretch of the same water. And for the first time she out-fished me, landing a dozen trout – by far her best outing ever. It had all finally clicked.
I asked her afterwards what she thought the key was, what was different now that brought better results. She said that one was confidence in her ability to land a trout once it was hooked – something not always easy in these swift and powerful mountain streams, and where barbless hooks are mandatory. Landing the big one gave her the belief she could do it, and this carried over to the other trout that afternoon (and many more since). She also felt that she passed a tipping a point in her understanding where trout hold in a water – the development of her ‘lie detector’. This is especially important, of course, in strong mountain streams, such as in the Alps, where a trout’s lie is often just a sliver of calm real estate. Erik Ostrander of Tenkara Guides had something to say about this at the Oni Tenkara School in Utah in 2023 – have a listen:
Watching Corina has been to watch a replay of my own journey in tenkara. And like hers, my learning isn’t over, and never will be. At least let’s hope so, because that’s what keeps it interesting, and fun. To paraphrase the old saying, “I’ve never fished the same river twice” – and also, each time a slightly different angler works the water.
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Great story Bill.
Great read. Thanks.
Thanks Dave, thanks Charles. It’s been fun to watch. One another ‘what-to-do’ that’s gotten much better for Corina, and contributed to her success, is strike detection. I remember that one taking me a long time (and is still, like everything, a work in progress). I think I caught more trout than her in the early going simply because I detected – and reacted to – more of my takes.
Great piece, love the story.