An interesting article from the site http://extrim.u-nat.ru

Spearfishing in the Caspian Sea

©SAMOVAR

I'm from Yekaterinburg myself, but it just so happened that I got into spearfishing far from home, on the Caspian sea-lake, in Kazakhstan, in the city of Aktau (formerly Shevchenko). And all my achievements in this field so far are tied to exactly these places. I think many of you would be interested to learn about the local "hunting grounds". And there's plenty to tell. Besides, I haven't found any information anywhere yet about spearfishing in these parts.
The first pleasant surprise waiting for a diver who takes the plunge into the Caspian here is the superb underwater visibility. By any standard it's simply superb, the water clarity is measured in tens of meters! A hunter can spot a fish long before it notices him. From personal experience I'll say the Caspian is no worse than Baikal. Once we were out on a yacht, back then it didn't even have an engine, maiden voyage, sea trials. We left the city of Aktau in the evening, headed out to sea, and the wind died. By morning we found ourselves a few miles off the city. Dead calm, morning coffee. Then one of the passengers drops her snow-white mug overboard. It slowly sinks to the bottom right under the yacht, a white spot among the pebbles. We had nothing better to do, so we immediately decided to drop anchor, get out the tanks and dive for the mug. The current was slowly carrying us sideways, so the anchor went down instantly. But the 30-meter anchor line barely reached the bottom! The current carried the yacht off, and the mug is still down there to this day. In short - that's the kind of visibility they've got there!

The first local a hunter will meet is probably the GOBY. No need to shoot a goby! It's easier to catch it on a piece of 0.5mm line and a No. 12 hook right underwater. It makes for some fun underwater fishing :). You can also catch gobies by hand, training your reflexes at the same time! Fried goby is an amazing delicacy, like a crunchy crouton.

If you lift a rock, there's a CRAYFISH sitting under it. I was surprised to see a freshwater creature in a sea, even if not a very salty one. The local crayfish aren't especially big, by Volga standards they're probably even on the small side. The reason for this, from what I've observed, is the shells. These critters settle on the crayfish's carapace and form sores on it. Then again, our wetsuits took a beating from the shells too. I think the bigger the crayfish, the harder it is for it to clean those pests off its shell. So crayfish don't manage to reach giant sizes in these waters. But there are huge numbers of them. If you put crayfish meat instead of sausage in an "Olivier" salad, it turns out pretty good!
Next on the crustaceans, there are also shrimp living here. They're not big either, but what a treat! True, they're pretty quick little things and catching them without special gear isn't easy. I used a knotted T-shirt as a net and scraped them off the weed-covered rocks.
By the way, about underwater vegetation, there's practically none here. Only far (100-130 km) north of Aktau, around Bautino, is the water full of weed, as if someone mows a lawn and dumps the grass into the sea. But that's already the Northern Caspian, and I can't tell you much about it.

The best places to hunt are the rocky shores, and there are quite a few of them here. In the water under the cliffs there are loads of huge boulders. The depth drops fast, and the huntable strip is up to 100 meters wide from the shore. Hunting is like wandering through a maze. There are three main "COMMERCIAL" fish species here: MULLET, CARP and BERSH (Volga pikeperch).

You can find MULLET everywhere. These are decent-sized fish, up to 2 kg, and they swim both alone and in big schools. Hunting mullet is the hardest, but I like it most of all. It's a very cautious fish and at the slightest scare it bolts. The easiest way is to sneak up on a small school of feeding mullet, cut across their path and lie in wait for the fish behind a rock. Then you can shoot practically point-blank. It's much harder to take a mullet out of a big school. A few fish always swim near the surface and spot the hunter much earlier. The whole school takes off, bunches up and bolts. You have a split second for the shot and have to fire from a fair distance at a fish racing past. In that case the quality of the speargun and the hunter's experience play a big role in success. This fish is very mobile and constantly migrates both along the shore and away from it. So it can show up at your hunting spot suddenly. Sometimes from the cliffs, a fair distance from shore, you can see lots of schools near the surface basking in the sun. Though near the shore you won't find a single one. But an hour later that whole mass can end up among the rocks and then… Local hunters say that during the mullet migration they managed to take 40 or more fish in a single hour. The fish come like a wall, and the hunter just picks out the bigger ones. But in my opinion that's not sporting, and is it even true?

Next up, the coveted prize for a hunter is the BERSH, or Caspian zander. These critters live about a hundred kilometres south of the city of Aktau and further on into Turkmenistan; how far south their range goes, I don't know. To look at, Caspian zander are practically no different from the river kind, except for the colour. The local zander is almost black. It lives under rocks, where in its black outfit it's practically invisible. Interesting fact - none of the local fishermen or hunters has ever seen the young of these fish! The smallest ones are at least 1kg. Then again, there aren't any fish much over 2kg either. So those are the standard zander sizes here. I still find this fact intriguing. Maybe somebody knows the reason for this and where they even come from, then? Hunting bersh comes down to constant diving and peering into the cracks under the rocks. And you won't find a zander in every hole. The hole has to have several exits. They're never in dead-end grottoes. The size of the rocks doesn't matter. A rock can be the size of a suitcase or the size of a house. Under a big rock you can find several bersh at once. And you can pick them off one at a time. It's a rare bersh that bolts. A lot of the bersh you find are asleep during the day, wedged somewhere deep in the "hole". So the main difficulty in hunting bersh is coaxing it out into a kill position. Often that just doesn't work, and the risk of losing the spear (mine has a front line attachment) makes you swim on. But it also happens that a seemingly "untakeable" bersh becomes easy prey. Once I spotted a zander under a rock, it was on the far side from me, facing the exit. I swim around the rock and, to my disappointment, see there's no way to dive under to it. I move on, disappointed, when all of a sudden that bersh shoots out of its hiding place straight at my speargun and instantly becomes my catch. Apparently it was in "HUNTING" mode and, noticing the tip of the gun, took it for a small fry. Some bersh you don't even have to shoot, you can just prick them like a dumpling. Oh, and I'll add that the fish is really tasty!
Carp in the sea! Another freshwater resident living quite happily in Caspian waters. You can come across carp anywhere in these waters. You meet them relatively rarely. But Caspian carp are really big. Fish over 20kg are not unusual. The biggest one we shot was about 18 kg. And it was swimming in a herd with other carp much bigger than it! I noticed that fish over 10 kg aren't afraid of the hunter. The smaller ones, 5-10 kg, are wary, and the young ones bolt right away. Just imagine, the second fish I ever shot in my life was a 12 kg carp! What an adrenaline rush! Not a bad start! At the end of the first day the order came – NO MORE SHOOTING CARP!!!

So, about the first day of hunting in more detail. We went out on two yachts, Tayfun and Tetis. The passage under sail from Aktau to Cape Adamtash took exactly 2 days. At dawn the cape was already within spitting distance and it seemed we'd be there in an hour. But along with the sun came a really strong wind blowing straight off the shore, i.e. right at us. We had to beat our way in until almost lunchtime. Tayfun, though, was a bit ahead and was already waiting for us under the cliffs. We met up around 11 in the morning. And right away we got the happy news – THE PLACE IS FULL OF FISH! Tayfun's deckhand Evgeniy had already managed to pull 4 good bersh out from under the very first rock, which we got fried for breakfast. Inspired by this news and looking forward to our first catch, we rushed straight to put our wetsuits on. We – meaning the 3 deckhands. The captains, meanwhile, carried on knocking back cognac, clearly intending to empty the bottle. Well, to hell with them, we dived in. I swim for 20 minutes among the rocks along the shore – NOTHING! Then I catch up with Deckhand Evgeniy and Deckhand Sergey, and they've already got about five decent zander and mullet each dangling on their fish stringers. Damn it! I swim on. As soon as I'd overtaken them and got to spots where "no human fin had yet flapped!", I immediately spotted the first mullet, first shot – and my first mullet ever is on the stringer!

I keep moving, and the stone maze leads me right up to the shore, onto a little sandy beach. I was about to turn back out to sea when I realised that it's not just rocks lying on the sand in the shallows! One of the rocks is clearly chewing something! It was a huge carp, it was calmly looking at me and peacefully carrying on munching on gobies! First thought – should I even shoot at it AT ALL! The carp was probably thinking – some bastard seal has shown up, a blue one at that! I decide to attack. The carp is facing me head-on, and of course I understand that shooting into that armour from this position is completely pointless. I size up where the fish's brain is supposed to be and aim at the middle of its forehead, just above the eyes, to drop it "on the spot". Hard to miss a forehead like that! I shoot, apparently I didn't hit the brain, the fish darted underneath me. In an instant the visibility dropped to zero, it was hard to tell who was dragging whom. The shaft held tight. I managed to grab the carp by the gills, stood up, the depth was no more than a metre, and hauled it out onto the shore. On the shore I immediately subdued the giant with a hefty rock. Caught myself thinking - the beast in me has woken up! I lift the fish over my head and try to show the trophy to the guys left on the yacht. Nobody on the yacht noticed me. But I did notice some kind of commotion going on there (more on that later). I clipped my catch onto the stringer and swam on. Soon Deckhands Evgeniy and Sergey caught up with me and gave my trophy an approving nod.

Swimming with that kind of load was pretty tough going, I managed to take another couple of good zander and headed back to the yacht.
So I get back to the yacht and present my first-ever spearfishing catch. To my surprise, the captain of the yacht Tetis is looking at my carp with zero joy and a bit of disdain, like, what's this small fry you've dragged in. So here's how it went, according to the people who were there. At roughly the same time I ran into my first carp, the two captains had polished off the cognac and decided to go hunting too. The slightly sloshed captain of the yacht Tetis suited up, grabbed his brand-new, never-used MARES speargun and was climbing down the yacht's ladder into the water. While fiddling to attach something he'd forgotten, he drops the spear and it settles on the bottom. There was about 10 meters of water under the yacht, white sand. He puts on his mask and, without getting off the ladder, looks down into the water. On the bottom, right under the yacht, stands an enormous fish, drawn, as we figured later, by the fish scraps and porridge thrown overboard after breakfast. The captain of the yacht Tetis, famous for his pranks, informs the rest of the folks on the yachts that there's a KUTUM right there under the yacht. Naturally, they tell him to get lost with his KUTUM. So the captain of the yacht Tetis, not mincing his words (and he's very gallant around women), explains that there really is a KUTUM down there and that he urgently needs a spare spear. While they were hunting for the spare spear, the captain dove down to the fish. The KUTUM turned out to be some kind of sturgeon, apparently a beluga. In girth the fish was no smaller than a ZODIAC's tube. Having sized up the opponent, it was urgently decided to find a coil of rope and tie it to the spear's shooting line.

They hunted as a team: the Tetis captain in the water, the Typhoon captain and his wife in the ZODIAC. On the yachts, the wives, the kids and the cat were cheering our guys on. Of course, all the decisions were made in a rush and without coordination, which later led to defeat. After that, things moved fast. The Tetis captain approached the fish and, as he put it, drove the spear into the beast's left shoulder blade. The beast gave a slight shudder, stayed put and froze, clueless. The captain of the yacht Tetis pushed the spear deeper into the fish's body with all his might and headed up to the surface. Up top, in the ZODIAC, the other captain, like a fool, tied the rope to the ZODIAC's cleat instead of to an empty 5-liter jug, as had been suggested. They'd barely hauled the diver into the boat when they felt a jerk, and the ZODIAC went off in tow behind the mighty fish. "HERE WE GO!" the Typhoon captain shouted, like Yuri Gagarin. But the ride didn't last long: the enraged fish started thrashing and the 4 mm line snapped like a thread. I tried hanging on it later, it held my weight! The captain of the yacht Tetis didn't hunt for three days, until the cognac ran out.