Today, August 1, 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of my receiving my first author’s copy of my first book, Philadelphia on the Fly: Tales of an Urban Angler.
The area I fished during the writing and illustration of the book has changed dramatically, with much redevelopment, and few seem to much remember the rough banks that once lined the Schuylkill River at the start of the 21st Century. Conversely, the Wissahickon Valley has maintained its wild integrity.
My little book has, if nothing else, provided a literary descriptive moment in time for an American urban outdoor space that thankfully still remains.
Silverside on the Sand AC: color on paper, by ron P. swegman
Tenkara Takes Manhattan: Live
Tenkara Takes Manhattan will be signing books and showing artwork at Brigantine VFW Memorial Post 6964 just north of Atlantic City on Saturday, May 10, 2025.
Copies of Philadelphia on the Fly: Tales of an Urban Angler and Small Fry: The Lure of the Little shall be available as well as signed original artwork and a few select fly patterns, including soft hackles tied for panfish and trout, and saltwater patterns meant for fluke, striped bass, and herring.
The sugar maples turn orange and blend with oak red and locust gold. The October Caddis, primarily orange, well imitated by means of orange floss.
Orange on the water in New York City is the space occupied by the pumpkinseed sunfish. Small, yet spirited, and still at times encountered in October when the trees hold onto their color just before the leaf hatch.
Open water remains. Cold, clear, high visibility no match for the fishes obscura.
Was that a trout? Was that a bass? Was it a reflection, of something else, something not even a fish? Daylight flies faster than the fisher.
Retired to the warm indoor, reading and the contemplation of visual art returns to front focus.
Moving Water by Dave Hall
Moving Water
by Dave Hall
hardcover, 50 pp.
Blaine Creek
Dave Hall, an artist of works in oil, has Moving Water give an illustrated meditation, poetry and brushwork combined, in a sublime 10-minutes of illuminated manuscript. Recommended.
Back Seat by Henry Hughes
Back Seat with Fish
by Henry Hughes
hardcover, 303 pp.
Skyhorse Publishing
Not to take a back seat, do take a Back Seat with Fish off the shelves and buy it. Don’t miss the opportunity to immerse with an American life lived in America’s northern corners, New York and Oregon, with the fishing haunting happily in its present attendance at all times in between. Recommended.
The Art of Angling and Fishing Stories edited by Henry Hughes
The Art of Angling
edited by Henry Hughes
hardcover, 256 pp.
Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf
The greater corpos (including, yet beyond the canon) gives a broad read in a pair, stories and poetry, presented in two attractive hardcover collected volumes edited by Dr. Hughes: The Art of Angling and Fishing Stories
Fishing Stories
edited by Henry Hughes
hardcover, 369 pp.
Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf
There are many, many literary angles as there are anglers, men, women, children who all still relish hours reading fish tales and rhymes pictured on the page in a quiet corner on a winter afternoon.
There is a Facebook user’s group named “Tenkara Where?” where one can see angling destinations speak for themselves in the thousand words of a single photograph.
So, then, so shall July be documented at TTM, not by pics of patterns or fish in grip, rather portraits of place, places angled in July 2018.
Spring warms toward summer. Tenkara takes to the salt again. Fluke on fly, bluefish off the jetty, schoolie stripers on top.
The pattern, a Sparse Silverside, size 2, bound to 3X, can attract all of the above when a little agitation through animation is employed along the water, often as the tide bottoms out, or at the top plateau of the high.
Bernard “Lefty” Kreh left us at the age of 93 on Pi Day, March 14th, a date almost fitting given the man’s full circle of a life.
One of his many achievements occured just a month after the passing of his great colleague, Lee Wullf, in the spring of 1991. No less an institution than the United States Postal Service honored Krey with a 1st Class postage stamp picturing his immortal Lefty’s Deceiver.
Lefty’ Deceiver and a 1925 Standing Liberty (what a quarter looked like the year Mr. Kreh was born)
That stamp, part of my extended collection, keeps a central special place in my pantheon. Chuck Ripper’s photogravures, which also depicted the Apte Tarpon, Jock Scott, Muddler Minnow, and Royal Wulff, were an early artistic inspiration like Dr. Burke’s plates found in Ray Bergman’s quintessential treatise, Trout, an inspiration for my own artwork.
I have two books in print full of my own fly pattern art, yet had never attempted Lefty’s Deceiver, until now:
“Lefty’s Deceiver (of fish!)” (pencils and rubber rub on paper, 2018)
I never fished with the man, but in person in private we talked, and I am happy to report he liked my comparison of tekara fishing the fly for crappie to that of saltwater fly fishing for the awesome Megalops, the tarpon. Both fish share a similar shaped mouth and gulp a fly in like manner; we agreed!
Memories, good memories, and a lifetime of lessons documented in interviews, videos, and a number of wonderful, readable books.
Lefty Kreh – you inform us, involve us, and your words shall remain stamped in our hearts and minds and our fishing.
Lefty Krey With Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass (from Tips and Tricks of Spinning by Lefty Kreh, c. 1969)
Catfish like the black bullhead will be a game opponent in summer if one waits for lower light and goes slow on the presentation speed. Evening lifts the direct sun off the lake and Ameiurus melas returns from the lake’s deeper places, the sinks and channeled centers, onto the flats, shallows where lily pads and branches attract diverse creature protein.
Bullhead Abode (NYC 07 12 2017)
Places storied as the same of the bass and other sunfish. The approach best calm, cautious, the fly, for me my one fly; a Green Guarantee kebari pattern, one that earlier lured a bluegill from the same end of the lake.
This plump pond permit flattened my Green Guarantee. (NYC 07 12 2017)
Slowed to a crawl, patience through repetition gets to be rewarded by a sudden tug, the shake of the head that compels the wrist to lift, set, find a fish on the line.
July evenings may find the finned to be a black bullhead catfish. Whenever I see this fish family’s end game wrestle about the surface, I see the whiskers, and smile.
We two, this fish and this fisher, are quite alike, even in the face.
Nature. Found. Naturally.
Josetsu and the elder shogunate clans, I hope, approve.
Black Bullhead the size of a zucchini . . . GOURD. (NYC 07 12 2017)
Arigato gozaimas!
zazen . . .
rPs 07 21 2017
Postscript: Revisit my first reference to Josetsu here, at TTM, circa April 2012:
Tenkara Takes Manhattan 