Underwater fishing :: Asp

They call it a ‘corsair’ of the river spaces, because it is always searching in the surface layers of reservoirs and predatory attacking its victims. I should say in the beginning that I don’t know any diving hunter, who has a serious experience of asp hunting in the rivers. In tens years of hunting the twelve best divers caught not more than ten sherespers (another asp’s name). The explanation is that the asp is never staying in the bushes, the grass or just near the bottom at least in the daytime. It is so quick and fearful that always runs away before you have noticed it. Moreover the hunters usually look down while the asp is near the surface.

   I was lucky to catch only a pair of asps of two pounds while all my hunting experience and both times occasionally. It happened the next way. I was swimming near my friend down the river. Of course, I was looking under myself in the fast appearing underwater scenery, hoping to find out a fish staying near the bottom. Suddenly I heard a shot near me. I looked up suddenly and saw a fish, which was disappearing arc-wisely, and an arrow was submerging a little further. My gun was leveled at the front and I pulled the trigger without aiming. At the second time all was almost same but without a warming friend’s shot.

   There is an asp with red lips in the south of the Caspian Sea. An old local name of this very tasty fish is ‘khansha’. The say that in old times its was a favorite fish meal of the powerful khans (the Koran doesn’t let Moslems eat a sturgeon as a sea-swine’s meat). The sea asp hunting is sporty and difficult. This fish is always moving and hunting like it is always hungry. Very often some asps are ‘tending’ a sprat flock moving after it and satisfying their appetite non-stop. Sometimes the asp joins a flock of another big fishes: of Black Sea roaches, for example.

   In the end of August the sprat coming starts. In this time in the south of the Caspian Sea all the ‘sardelle’ fleet gathers – seiners specialized in the sprat catching. The asp comes for this small fish too. The interesting watch and successful hunt for these predators fell to one Moscow diving hunter’s lot, when he was at the far Pirsogatskie ridges. A small fed by springs lagoon was formed in the underwater ridge, which rises till the surface and exserts far from an island to the sea. Broken at upper edge of the ridge water made a blanket of bubbles in it. In the morning and the evening when the sprat thick stream is coming, many fishes are crowding into this natural bath. The diving hunter swam into the lagoon, dived, laid on the bottom and leveled a gun straight up.

   Here the asp is ‘flying’ into the lagoon. Flying with already open mouth and the small finger fishes, which didn’t even have time to scare are disappearing in it. And the asp is running from one side to another like a wolf in a sheep-fold with the lambs and it is shoveling the fishes with its wide mouth like with a big shovel. The predator’s belly has unnaturally hung down already, but it is still shoveling and shoveling… But the nature rule says that there is always a hunter for any hunter and many asps became the trophies of the man. The biggest asp was hit here too. Its weight was eleven pounds. Such weight is said to be maximum for the red lips asp in the ‘Qualifier of fishes’.