The last couple of months have been stressful. I attended a school on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday and in addition to this, we had to learn a new management system and software at work. In short, I was super busy and stressed about it. Life is good at home, my family supporting me but still, very little time off and lots of studying.
Last weekend was Father's Day and I spent it in Glen Canyon packrafting with my boys. It was a lot of fun but again, as much fun as it was, it was stressful too. I was worried about my boys learning to paddle on the big cold river. We were alone, a 9 mile paddle from our car, overnighting on a beach of the Colorado River. I didn't even bring a fishing rod, I wanted to keep focused on my boys making sure they had a good time and didn't get into trouble.
They didn't, they had a great time.
So today was a day trip starting at 4a, a 220 mile one way to our stream. My friend picked me up and we talked on the way.
I taught him tenkara and he took to it on a pretty intense level. We went to the summit, meet Ishigaki sensei, we have fished together quite a bit and he is a fly fisher that took to tenkara as a method. He recently bought a Czech nymphing fly rod, a 10' 3-weight and was excited to fish it in our home fishing grounds in the White mountains.
The trip went pretty fast, before we knew it, we were at our little stream stringing up and casting. Quickly falling into a fishing rhythm that only fisher people know. The stream was in good shape after a banner fall, winter and spring of snow.
We fished the lower section pretty quickly. We caught a few fish, the action slow and back at the car, we slowly decided we didn't have enough fishing.
The browns at Gold Valley were HUNGRY! I used my pattern to catch more than a dozen nice sized small stream trout. We were only supposed to fish for an hour but it ended up being 2 or 3.
I really enjoyed the moments together. I use a box that Sebata san helped me with my hanko and Richard Setina put together. I love pulling it out on stream and picking out a fly I designed and use as my "one fly."
Each riffle and bend pool held trout. The wind was up blowing up to thirty yet you could wait for a lull and get an accurate cast in. The wind pulled the line making strikes difficult to detect but it didn't matter, the fish were eager and if you put a pool down, there was another one just around the bend.
I think we walked (fished) downstream more than a mile and we knew it was time to turn around, we still had a four hour trip home.
All in all, it was a great day of fly fishing and tenkara. The stress is gone, I'm back into the rhythm of life, fishing with a great friend.
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