Meeting An Unusual Fish - Winter Rattan Fishing

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

Fishing tales

When my good old friend, the huntsman Kuzmich, having arrived in the city on business, invited me and my constant fishing partner Vadim to catch gobies on the Peat Lake, we looked at each other in bewilderment …

After all, gobies are inhabitants of warm seas. I happened to catch this fish in Tuapse, but how did it end up here, far in the North?

Apparently, the same doubts overcame Vadim, because, looking incredulously at Kuzmich, he stretched out:

- Gobies on the Karelian Isthmus? This is something new…

- And in fact - this is a completely new, hitherto unknown fish, - confirmed the huntsman. And looking at us slyly, he asked:

- So how are you going to catch gobies?

Vadim and I agreed.

- I myself do not fish in winter, but I will introduce you to a forester from a neighboring village - an avid fisherman. With him you will pull the bulls, - concluded Kuzmich.

… When we got out of the carriage, a heavily knocked, middle-aged man appeared before us. His name was Sergei. After a short acquaintance, he suggested:

- If you are not very tired, we can go to the lake today. We agreed. And therefore, after drinking tea at Kuzmich, we moved to the lake. In addition to a bag with fishing accessories, Sergei took with him an ice pick and a one and a half meter stick, at the end of which there was a small hook.

I knew this lake. In the summer it was surrounded by such swamps that it was almost impossible to get to clean water. Therefore, no one caught fish there. True, winter is now in full swing, and therefore the ice is reliable. But I had to go knee-deep in the snow.

- This fish is called gobies by fishermen from St. Petersburg who come to the lake on weekends, - explained our guide. - According to them, the fish from the Peat Lake are very reminiscent of the Black Sea gobies. In fact, this is rotan, or firebrand. Noble fish, I tell you: it is a pleasure to catch it …

The lake was a slightly elongated oval, half a kilometer long and about three hundred meters wide. Sergei stopped about ten meters from the gentle bank, completely overgrown with grass. Having tapped the ice with the ice pick, he made five marks on the ice and said:

- We will catch here.

And he began to hammer the ice with an ice pick. Vadim and I used ice screws. When the holes were ready, Sergey thrust a stick with a hook into each of them and rotated it there. After that, he pulled his gun onto the ice, along with the bundles of last year's withered grass that had been wound around the hook. In this way, I cleaned the bottom. After that, he took a box with very finely chopped meat from the pocket of his sheepskin coat and poured two pinches into all the holes. We, in turn, added crushed bloodworms there. Thus, all the holes were fed.

Seeing our impatience, Sergei explained:

- Let's wait about ten minutes until the bulls gather, and then we will catch.

With these words, he took out a winter fishing rod with a homemade jig from his bag. We have prepared our own fishing rods with branded jigs. I had a "barrel", Vadim had an "ant."

- We definitely need a planting, - Sergey said, and when we wanted to put caddis jigs on the hook, he stopped us:

- It's too much. Local gobies are reliably taken for meat. - And handed us small cubes of pork.

Then he planted the same cube on the hook and lowered the jig into the hole. We followed his example, and the fishing began … The first rotan - no more than a little finger - was caught by Vadim.

Probably, he was late with the striking, because the fish swallowed the jig so deeply that they had to extract it from the inside of the rotan with an extractor. After that, the bites followed one after another. As soon as one of us stopped biting, we moved on to the next hole and continued to pull out rotans. True, they were all like a selection: no more than 7-8 centimeters. And only about an hour later, Sergei was lucky: he caught a rotan much larger than the others - 10-12 centimeters. In two hours we caught more than a hundred fish. Although, I must admit, it was mostly a trifle, but still nice: the peck was excellent.