Underwater fishing :: Perch

This is the most typical representative of the most numerous class of fishes (about 40% of a common number of their types) and vertebrates at all. Seems like this is a reason of its wonderful adaptability in any inhabiting conditions and its wide popularity in all the freshwater reservoirs. There are many common perches in the desalinated creeks, for example, in the Baltic Sea. Sadly this predator grows up till its six pounds seldom. Usually the reservoirs are filled with the ‘tightly grown’ populations – ‘sailors’ as the fishers called them. I shot the perches of about two pounds in the Valdai lakes, in the tributaries of Don, in Dnepr, in the Klyazma near Moscow and in the Kolp of Vladimir. There were many such specimen in the Moscow river before too.

   One thing is common for the big perches – they are curious. And we used this characteristic feature in hunt.

   After you have seen a perch flock moving in the surface, dive and lie in their sight. The flock is moving further but one usually leaves them, swims arc-wisely down and comes closer to the interesting object and little by little reduces speed. Here it stopped at all. To shoot in a fish in such positions almost always means to miss. If you endured and didn’t scare the perch, then after it satisfied its curiosity it will start to turn away. This is a moment to shoot.

   The big perches stay in the thick underwater growth seldom. Mostly their separated group of five-eight perches of different ‘calibers’ walks in the open space above a sand bottom. May be they do so because the perches run after food, but not only beat it from an ambush with one rush like the pikes and the pikeperches do.

   The perch meat is very white and tasty. It is harder to scale it than another fish, that is why many people take the scales off with its skin using the pliers and the scissors. Before scaling an uneviscerated fish it is necessary to incise skin along its back, belly and across near a head and a tail.