>>2704926Historically speaking, hillbillies in the Smoky Mountains have you beat by over a hundred years. They came up with their own brand of fixed-line fly fishing independently of both Japanese tenkara and Italian pesca a mosca Valsesiana. The Smoky Mountain tradition died off, the Italian one stuck around in its homeland, and tenkara exploded in popularity recently. It's really cool to me that people in such vastly different regions of the world ended up in very similar situations (isolated mountain creeks filled with ravenous trout) and ended up coming to the same conclusion (simple wet flies, oftentimes with reversed hackle, on long cane poles).
