Dashgil

The fishing station is just before you reach Alat. The place is known for its abundance of kutum and for its fishing "cots" (small platform huts on stilts out in the open sea).
That's exactly what we went fishing from — one of these cots. Ours stood 1.5 km from the shore. They ferried us over in a motorboat and we made it onto it safely with all our gear. We settled in and cast our lines. I should point out that you need to bring your own shrimp, because there haven't been any there for a couple of years now, since there's either drilling or oil well development going on nearby. At least that's how the locals explained the lack of bait to us.

A must-have for any angler is a landing net with a long handle: on most cots the platform you stand on is more than two meters above the water, and if a decent specimen gets on your hook, hauling it up will be a real problem and you'll most likely lose the fish, which is exactly what happened to us a couple of times out of naivety. But then we got smarter, and whenever someone was playing another kutum, one of us was already standing on the ladder with the net to help out.

I'll say the fishing was pretty mediocre, since we'd been counting on more... Either the cot wasn't in "the right spot," or we just haven't really learned how to fish from one yet, but it felt like the fish routes weren't here, and our bites were like some stray fish breaking off from the school and wandering over to us — I mean, in a whole day and night we never once felt a real school of fish. Single bites on 4 spinning rods every 10-30 minutes get a bit tiring. Meanwhile our neighbors on the cot 200 meters from us hauled in about 25-30 kilos in the same time. And on top of that, toward the end of the trip, half of my modest catch escaped from the new keepnet I'd bought a couple of days beforehand. Turns out a decent-sized hole had somehow formed in the bottom of the keepnet and the small fish managed to get out through it to freedom. These keepnets (a yellow keepnet with two floats for buoyancy) are sold everywhere now, and when you buy one, pay attention to the quality of the knots on the bottom. Chinese stuff... Damn them...

I should also say that at night bigger fish come in, and it's much more relaxed fishing because there are fewer of the active, ever-present gobies, which, by the way, are really big here, and it's no sin to take those home for fish cakes.

Mind you, fishing at night from a cot in the open sea isn't for everyone. Even a light breeze at sea will chill you to the bone, and by morning it gets so freezing that you'll have to do some exercises or drink hot tea (or something stronger) just to warm up somehow. So take warmer clothes with you, even if you're going out there in what seems to you like warm weather...

From the looks of it, the fishermen at the station just make some extra money ferrying people from the shore to the cots, while the cots themselves have a completely different owner, and each one has its own. So don't get your hopes up thinking they'll give you access to the hut itself and let you sleep inside unless you personally know the cot's owner — you'll most likely have to sleep out under the open sky. But that's no problem for a real angler, is it?