A View of Tenkara in Austria

I recently had the good fortune to visit Austria, meet some of the country’s tenkara anglers, and see how fixed-lining is done there. The occasion was the 2024 Austria Tenkara Weekend, which is organized each year in early autumn by Bernhard Niedermair. I had read Tenkara Angler’s 2020 interview with Bernhard, and was keen to meet this guy who lands 40-inch pike on a tenkara rod.

From some previous, non-fishing visits, I knew Austria a bit, but not well. In the espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the late, great John le Carré, one of the characters opines (at least in the BBC television production) that, “The secret services are the only true expressions of a nation’s character”.  Perhaps, but I think food is also up there, and Austria served up a very good first impression. Corina and I drove from Switzerland, and soon after crossing the border we stopped to fuel up at an Austrian gas station/truck stop, and we also made it our lunch stop.

In the service station’s cafeteria we shared a plate of fantastic, crispy, skin-on pork roast, braised sauerkraut, dumplings, excellent salads, and for me (the non-driver) some crisp Austrian white wine. The travel vittles back home at Kwik Trip are not quite on par… If this gas station was back in the States it could be a five-star restaurant. Welcome to Austria.

We paused for a night in Salzburg, and in the morning, a Friday, took a walk to visit Mozart’s birth home (while speculating on the likelihood of trout in the River Salzach, which we followed through the heart of the city to our destination; did Wolfie fish it as a kid?). In the afternoon we toured the beautiful, 400 year-old estate of Schloss Hellbrunn, just outside Salzburg. One of the rooms in the villa is filled with art depicting wildlife – plus a stuffed and mounted unicorn (horse meets narwhal presumably).

Almost as wondrous and intriguing as the unicorn are paintings of some large salmonids – a good omen – with some ornate descriptive text:

The paintings are essentially a 17th Century version of fish taxidermy, and depict fish that were wild caught and then lived out their lives as additions to the estate’s ponds. Bernhard later helped decode what they are – Huchen, a.k.a, Danube Salmon (Hucho hucho), a species endemic to the Danube basin. This was a fish new to my ken, but Bernhard has caught them. According to the ornate script, one of the Huchens was 9 kg – about 20 lbs – when it was caught, and there are modern records of these trout up to 90 lbs. Maybe I needed to move up a tippet size or two…  

From Schloss Hellbrunn we continued south toward the Alps and rendezvoused with Bernhard and several other fixed-liners in the mountain town of Bad Gastein, appropriately at the Hotel Mozart. The town clings to the walls of a narrow ravine cut by a torrent of a stream; its founders went to the trouble of squeezing in a village there due to the presence of local thermal springs (“Bad” = ‘bath’), and it became something of a spa town back in the day.

In the evening the group gathered for dinner at a restaurant within sound of the town’s rushing stream, to socialize and plot the weekend’s fishing. In talking with Bernhard over another excellent meal (roast pork again for me, grilled wild trout for Bernhard), I started to learn that fishing regulations in Austria, at least for stream trout, can be quite complex, and often vary significantly from water to water, largely due to many private fishing clubs with control over some streams. In fact, we would spend the weekend ahead fishing one such water, Nassfelder Arche, for which we would each pay a fee. We’d be the only ones on the water for the weekend, and would be restricted to catch & release of the trout it held, browns and non-native brookies (bending a rod on a Huchen would need to wait another time).

The next morning we car-pooled to the Nassfelder and rigged up. In addition to Bernhard, Corina and myself, our group included four other anglers from various parts of Austria, one from Germany, a few wives and girlfriends who joined for the camaraderie and hiking, and Bernhard’s daughter, Nina, who served as the expedition’s photographer. The anglers represented a broad range of fixed-line experience; Bernhard was an early adopter of tenkara in 2013, while a couple of the others had picked it up just in the last year. Europe is still quite thin on suppliers of tenkara gear, and most of the group had ordered their rods and riggings from the U.S. Here’s a roll call of what they fished with:

• Bernhard: Nissin Zerosum Oni Honryu 450
• Wolfgang: Wasatch Tenkara Rods Daikyu T-Hunter and DRAGONtail Hellbender
• Josef, Markus: both with rods from MaxCatch Tenkara, ordered from Amazon
• Damian, an Englishman who has lived for many years in Vienna: Oni Type I and DRAGONtail Raganarok
• Heinz-Georg, from Dresden, Germany: Tenkara USA Ito.

Quite a diversity of gear. Corina went with her DRAGONtail Mutant, and I rigged a rod new to me, and in fact new to the world, which I’d brought along to show the Austrian guys – the new NIRVANA Kokoro 360, which I paired with 2.0 YGK ULTRA Sight Thin level line. Earlier in the year at the Tenkara Wisconsin Great Driftless Campout I had a chance to try a prototype of this light, very well-balanced and well-made rod. I fell in love with it and ordered one as soon as DRAGONtail offered it for sale. I also slid into my pack, for longer casts, a long-time fave and another exquisitely balanced rod, my Suntech TenkaraBum 40 – it drops a fly on the water like a whisper. I rounded out my kit for the day with another rod fairly new me, which I’ve found I especially like for nymphing, the Rob Worthing designed Tanuki Shinobi 395. And so I was set with one old ‘friend’ and a couple of new ones to explore what tenkara in Austria has to offer.

At first it was hard to focus on fishing, because the setting was so spectacular. I mean, wow, wow…

Eventually, Corina and I got our attention from the gorgeous surroundings to the gorgeous water, and we soon got into both browns and brookies. In addition to the land’s beauty, it made for some good, easy fishing as mountains go, because Bernhard had brought us to a stretch of the Nassfelder that flows over a broad and open plateau. No steep scrambles over boulders, or back casts into trees.  And in short order, Corina landed a nice brown that would prove to be the largest fish for both of us that weekend:

This was some fine fishing. And even better, we were in a national park, and the park’s amenities included an excellent restaurant close to the water. Call it Austrian hospitality.  At mid-day, we all came off the stream and gathered there for some good beer, good stories and a lunch break. 

As I was getting to know Bernhard, I picked up on two things: when it comes to fishing, and tenkara in particular, he’s a resilient pioneer – an innovator – and he’s an artist. He was probably the first adopter of tenkara in Austria (and one of the first in Europe), and he encountered significant resistance from traditional Austrian fly fishing circles, even though that’s the world he came from (he’s been fly fishing since 1979).

In Austria initially, and the same in Germany, tenkara was not legally recognized as fly fishing; and given the complexity of fishing regulations in Austria, this put some limits on the legal use of tenkara. Some other fly anglers suspected Bernhard of just using tenkara to dap worms, or that he used this simplistic gear because he was too simplistic and clumsy to handle a traditional fly rod. But Bernhard persevered, steadily and patiently, and focused on influencing the influencers – respected members of a powerful national organization, the Österreichische Fischereigesellschaft (‘Austrian Fishing ­Society’).

Eventually, thanks to Bernhard’s efforts, they came around, and supported the recognition of tenkara as a legal form of fly fishing – which opened the use of tenkara gear on waters designated as ‘fly fishing only’. Tenkara in Europe owes a significant debt to Bernhard Niedermair, and his passion and commitment.

Still, Bernhard reports that traditions run very deep in Austria, and the uptake of tenkara has proceeded slowly in his country. He estimates that still just a couple dozen Austrians fish tenkara regularly. But while progress has been slow, against some old and strong currents, under Bernhard it has been steady.

Another thing to like about Bernhard is he clearly thinks a lot about how to do tenkara well, and with style – a tenkara artist. One example is his beautiful hat, which I sense is as essential to his streamside gear as his rods and net. Imagine Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart with a tenkara rod, and you’ll get a sense of Bernhard: 

My tenure in tenkara is not as long Bernhard’s, and my experience is rooted in a different background from a different part of the world. I come from what could be called the Tenkara no Oni/Rob Worthing – Tenkara Guides/Matt Sment lineage of tenkara, which puts emphasis on going light and with low profile to achieve stealth (things like using 2.0 level lines, and keeping it off the water), and taking advantage of light gear to manipulate the fly in a diversity of presentations.

Bernhard also mixes things up, by importing elements of traditional fly casting into his tenkara techniques. As he put it, “Over the years, I developed my own style, and it’s simply exciting to combine the ‘recipes’ from both worlds (fly fishing / tenkara) and create my own ‘cake; from them”. His pioneer spirit speaking.

For example, of course he also understands the utmost importance of stealth (during the weekend he said to me more than once, “Bill, be careful – the trout here are very shy”), and sometimes he approaches it not by using the lightest gear, but gear that helps him stay as far as possible from the fish for his cast and presentation. Consequently, he typically rigs his 4.5 m long Nissin Zerosum Oni Honryu with about 5m of red furled line. He can get a cast out there, in almost any weather, calm or wind.  And since he focuses on achieving stealth through maximum distance from the fish, he is more comfortable with lowering his rod tip somewhat and allowing his line to drape on the water to extend his reach. In any case, he casts that 10 m long rig – rod, line and tippet – with the grace of an artist.

Bernhard’s simplicity of fly patterns reflects his passion for tenkara, and his emphasis on technique with rod and line more than elaborately matching the hatch and so forth. He generally uses just a couple of patterns, which he ties himself, such as this large dry; I think it’s the only fly he used during the weekend, to good effect:

Back at the Hotel Mozart after our first day on the water, after another good dinner, Bernard and some of the other guys settled into an evening of tying up more offerings for the next day:

The following morning we were all back at the Nassfelder for the second and final day.  Corina and I worked further upstream, to try a new stretch.  We found trout all along the way, and I soon felt like I was back home in the Wisconsin Driftless, fishing amongst familiar local ‘wildlife’:

As has happened in Switzerland, Bernhard has noted declines in stream trout fishing in Austria. He estimates that today’s fishing is only about 60% of what it was when he fished waters in the late 1970s and 1980s. In a spectacular two-month stretch back then he caught more than 500 grayling (not bad for someone clumsy with a fly rod…), and that sort of abundance is now a thing of the past. The loss of insect life due to modern farming practices, the ‘taming’ of rivers through hydropower dams, and extreme weather swings, likely wrought by climate change (some years too little water, some years too much), have all taken their toll. In fact, just a couple of weeks after the tenkara weekend, Austria and other parts of central Europe were hit by some of the worst flooding on record.

Still, the weekend showed that Bernhard still knows how to find trout – and all of us were beneficiaries of his generosity and of his tenkara leadership in Austria. Vielen Dank, Bernhard.

With many thanks to Bernhard and his daughter Nina for their assistance in the preparation of this post – and to all of the Austria tenkara group for their welcoming fellowship.

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