Gudgeon, Lifestyle And Habits. Gudgeon Fishing

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Fishing Academy

Who knows the gudgeon - a small fish that lives in a variety of bodies of water. It can be found where the bottom is sandy, pebble, sandy-pebble. He does not avoid the hard clay bottom. If the current is weak, the gudgeon keeps on the rifts, if it is strong, it stands in the pits behind the rift.

If you look closely at the gudgeon, it immediately strikes the eye that by its shape and color the fish is ideally adapted to its habitat - at the bottom. Here is how LP Sabaneev describes it: “… A lumpy body, devoid of mucus, is greenish-brown on top and covered with bluish or blackish spots, which sometimes merge on the sides and form a dark strip; abdomen yellowish, silvery; the dorsal and caudal fins are speckled with dark brown spots. The eyes are yellow."

All this camouflage allows the fish to remain on the bottom almost invisible. This disguise is designed to protect the minnow from enemies. And he has a great many. It is not for nothing that gudgeon is considered a tasty catch for most fish, and in the diet of burbot it generally prevails.

In addition to secrecy and protective coloration, the gudgeon has another undoubted advantage: it grows much faster than other fish, and therefore, thanks to its excellent appetite and abundance of food, the fish from the eggs reaches a length of 6 centimeters over the summer. It has been noticed that in ponds and lakes minnows never reach the same size as in rivers. The usual sizes of minnows are 12-15 centimeters with a weight of 50-80 grams. Very rare specimens reach a length of 20-22 centimeters.

Gudgeon feeds mainly from the bottom, so its mouth is at the bottom of its head. And two antennae on the sides of the mouth serve as organs of touch. The common food of minnows is animal organisms: small red worms, larvae of the pusher mosquito, insects, crustaceans such as daphnia and cyclops. In the spring, the gudgeon mainly eats the caviar of various fish (including his own), which, of course, damages the population of valuable fish.

Gudgeons spawn in April-June in shallow water with a rocky bottom, sometimes on rifts, much less often among aquatic vegetation. Usually very quiet, they behave quite noisily at this time: they often stick their tails out of the water and beat them on the surface.

Since the gudgeon most often lives on the current, it is most successful to catch it in the wiring. Proceeding from this, a great connoisseur of fishing S. T. Aksakov in the book "Notes on a fish-eating" offers three ways to catch minnows … 1. You can fish with a surfacing (float) and a moderately heavy sinker, running so deep that the sinker is in weight, and the hook dragged along the bottom. This is good for a moderate flow rate. 2. It is possible to fish without surfacing with a very heavy sinker located at a distance of two or even three quarters from the hook (a quarter - about 18 centimeters); the sinker will lie on the bottom, and the forest with the worm will wriggle along the stream of water. This is the best way, especially on strong rapids. 3. You can fish without a sinker at all, with surfacing, or better without surfacing, let the water carry the hook with the worm at its own discretion: by the speed of the current, it will not suddenly touch the bottom,but at his approach the minnows quickly rise up and grab the hook."

You can fish gudgeon immediately after the ice drift and before the first frost. Since this is a purely daytime fish, it should be caught at dawn, sometimes it bites well during the day. At night, the gudgeon does not take at all. Fishing line is needed thin - 0.15 millimeters, hooks number 2.5-3. Most often, one is used on a fishing rod, but some anglers use two, three or even four hooks. And it happens that several fish come across at the same time.

The rod should be light with a flexible whip tip. The attachment is most often a dung worm, and not whole, but only part of it. The fisherman should take into account that the gudgeon takes better not on a fresh, but on a dented, sucked and even completely lethargic worm. So you should not rush to replace such a nozzle: after trying, the minnow will definitely come back and take it. You can also use other attachments, such as bloodworms.

But whatever the nozzle on the hook, it must be at the very bottom, and even better if it drags along it. The gudgeon rarely pays attention to the nozzle moving above him. His bite is energetic, so he rarely gets off the hook.

Especially catching gudgeon in the wild, in turbid water. This is done like this: above the roll where they hold, you need to enter the water and start stirring it up. On this dregs minnows without any fear in search of profit rise up and sometimes even poke their noses into the boots of the fisherman. Now is the time to cast the rod.

Since the gudgeon is an excellent bait for fishing other fish, you can use a simple but very effective tackle to catch it … You need to take a metal bowl or a tin can 3-7 centimeters high. Then cut a hole the size of a walnut in a piece of old cloth. The jar is tied with this fabric so that the hole is in the middle, and the ends are pressed from below with an elastic band. You need to put porridge or bread inside. Now it only remains to take the tackle to the river roll and bury it so that the top is at the bottom level. You can check the tackle in 20 minutes (during this time, up to two dozen minnows are sometimes recruited into the bank).