Pirsaat, the 105 km canal, Shagay and the Salyan canals

We set off almost in the morning, around 10, and took our time heading out to scout Pirsaat. I'd long wanted to scout the approaches there and make contact with the locals for a future trip. We didn't make it all the way to the fishing base - we got sidetracked by a beach where we decided to sit out the heat and rest :) but I did get to know the locals. I think you can spin from the shore there too, since in the little shallow pools right at your feet small mullet were zipping back and forth like torpedoes. But you'll have to wade far out, because the water off the shore is very shallow. Great spots for camping, too. A wild beach, and apart from a few fishermen's trailers there's not a soul for a couple of kilometres around. Anyway, we sat on the beach and sunbathed to our heart's content...

Next we headed to Salyan in search of pike and decided to stop by the good old canal at the 105 km mark on the way to scout it. Unfortunately, from the start of summer and apparently until mid-autumn, the water in the canal is in bloom and there's no way to actively fish spoons. You can still try casting live bait into the gaps in the weed, but there's nothing there for active anglers, except maybe vertical jigging spoons from a boat. By the way, the underwater visibility there is good for spearfishers right now, though I don't know how well the gentlemen spearfishers get along with thick weed...

In the end we figured we'd wasted enough precious time and decided to head to the Shagay and the irrigation canals around it in Salyan. I should mention that the day before, an acquaintance told me he'd been in those parts a couple of days earlier, dove and didn't see a single living fish, which suggested that the locals or some passing barbarian poachers had poisoned the water or electrofished it. That may well have been the case, actually, since in some of the big canals where there should have been fish, there weren't any. Anyway, through active searching we did find fish, but more on that a bit later...

While driving around along the Shagay, I also decided to cast bottom rigs for catfish into the Shagay itself (for those who don't know, it's the same thing as the Main Mil-Mugan Canal). But since we didn't have any decent bait for them, we bought laundry soap and sausages on the way. Thought we'd get lucky... :) Unfortunately, neither the sausages nor the dog soap interested the catfish that day, and our bottom rigs lay there untouched right up until nightfall. We could have shot a sparrow, of course, or gotten chicken scraps or offal from the locals, but as always - precious time was tight. In short, the Shagay itself gave us nothing to be happy about...

But the drainage collectors delivered some great emotions! The first pike was found in a little spot I remembered from our last visit. On the very first cast she hit the spoon, but something about the hardware didn't suit her and she managed to spit it out without even giving me a chance to set the hook. Oh well! We decided to smoke her out no matter what. And other lures went into action. A rattling wobbler imitating a wounded fish made no impression whatsoever. A spinner that worked really cool in the water got no reaction from the pike, only from me. But a soft plastic fish (jig-style) became the last catch of this sneaky-a*s predator :) She hit the soft plastic at thirty centimetres down, and a few seconds later she was flopping on the ground and posing for photos... As you'd expect, our mood noticeably improved, and we decided to move on through the fields, since it was clear that "there's fish in this here sea" :) Next we found a small stretch of some unknown little canal, overgrown with weed and looking completely unpromising. I decided to throw a spoon, since another lure could get tangled in the underwater weeds faster. A 10 m cast, the retrieve and... a powerful bite! Just imagined it, I thought. Probably snagged some weed... A few more casts - nothing. Moved to the side. Cast. Another cast... Nothing. Fine, I'll throw one last time... Plop - the spoon landed on the water in the dusk. The retrieve, and then, 2 metres from the bank, she struck! Like a torpedo the pike powerfully pulled the rod to the right, breaking the evening silence with loud splashes. I barely had time to reel in the line, the spinning rod bent in half, and I just yanked my best trophy of the day out of the water. A beauty of a pike at exactly 1 kg danced her last dance on the grass...

The fishing was a real success, although I'd expected more. But no worries, it's all still ahead! We'll come back here more than once and show the "pike spawn" (affectionately) our spoons! My advice to beginner fans of active fishing - the main thing is, don't sit in one place! Keep moving and look for promising spots, and of course remember them. A fish you found but lost can be smoked out later in different ways. The main things are patience, persistence and desire!

P.S.