Underwater fishing :: Sazan (carp)

It is strange but many fishers think that a sazan and a carp are different fishes. And their argument is that there is a big difference in their appearance.

   It is not so. A famous scientist and a fisher L. P. Sabaneev wrote that the sazan and the carp are the same fish. The ‘Qualifier of freshwater fishes of the USSR’ confirms it and gives concrete biological information and the signs of a genus already.

   For all the underwater hunters a cat-fish and the sazan are the most desired trophies in all reservoirs. Exactly these fishes grow up very big. In 1991 year in the Moscow region in the Ozerninskoe storage pond a sazan of 64 pounds was seined. The fishers call the big sazans the ‘suitcases’ and the underwater hunters call them ‘tanks’. Both are right. After a fisher brought such big fish to the bank, it is lying on its side and its body isn’t going down as of other fishes but it is lying as it is swollen. It is wide, relatively short and fat – a real ‘suitcase’.

   We call them ‘tanks’, because its big, covering one another scales protects the fish as an armor. If you found under water such a ‘tank’, which is staying calm in the seldom grass, it doesn’t mean that it is yours already. Often such meetings finish with one or two scales left by the fish on the harpoon arrow. At all.

   I remember a great hunting in the low parts of Dnepr. Sadly we had only river relatively weak guns.

   The first group of the big sazans passed in one and a half of meter from me. My arrow stuck in a fish’s side as in a stone wall. The sazan was moving calm as nothing had happened. After next diving the sazans appeared again and followed just same way. This time I was closer to them but after a shot a sazan just twitched a little and changed its way slightly and even didn’t hasten its speed. There was one scale of a centimeter diameter on the arrow. It is hard to reproduce my condition I had after such ‘hunt’! In such cases the divers say: ’A half of tears in a mask and shaking knees!’

   That is why the gun must be the most powerful at the sazan hunt. It is more effective to shoot at this fish from the back for an arrow point went under the scales. If you shoot from a fish’s side and you are not sure that an arrow will break an ‘armor’, then aim at the gills cover. The sazan is strong but it is easier to hold it on the arrow than a pike or a cat-fish, because the sazan is not lithe enough.

   In summer the sazan almost doesn’t stay in one place of a lake, a reservoir pond or a sea. The sazan flocks can be careful and fearful, that is why it is better to lie in hiding. But when there were many fishes in the Caspian Sea, the sazan was always calm in the big flocks. After a shot fishes swam a meter or two away and started to eat calm again without looking at their brother beating on the arrow near.

   In the rivers this fish often swims in a thick coarse grass and it is almost impossible to swim close to it and not to scare. That is why the divers thought out an original method of hunt in a river with many islands of reed and reed mace. At first a hunter breaks with stream loudly through an overgrowth of this grass, where depth is about a half of a meter or even less and turns out the fishes. Then he moves up the stream and looks for them and hunts well in a soft growth close to the island.

   A hunter should work careful with a sazan beating on an arrow, because its back fin is armored with a serrated bone ‘saber’ and pelvic fin with a same but smaller ‘blade’. But when the fish is on the stringer already, these sawtooth spines are not dangerous for a diving suit, because the sazan is not used to spread its fins as a pikeperch and a crucian do.

   The river sazan is very tasty. My family prefers its dark and sweet meat to eel meat. It is enough just to fry or boil the sazan to eat it with a lot of pleasure. The patties with the sazan meat, which I was eating while the duck hunt in the delta of Volga, are remained in my memory as the best hot fish meal for a whole life.

   Some hunters and their wives scale the big sazans with fingers: put them under the scales near a tail and at one movement of a hand they strip the fish side exactly in the breadth of a palm. Several movements and a ten-pound sazan is ‘naked’.