Mullet hunting

Mullet hunting

Mullet is one of the few commercial fish of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. People catch it in different ways — with nets, on sea worms, with dynamite, but those methods aren't for me. I'm a spearfisher. Since 1994, during my summer holidays, I've speared mullet in five different spots in Crimea, and now I want to share my impressions.

First, a little about the fish. There are 4 species of this silvery delicacy — so-iuy mullet (pilengas), flathead grey mullet (loban), sharpnose mullet (ostronos) and golden grey mullet (singil). Both in size and in numbers, the first 2 species are way ahead. The sharpnose and the golden grey are smaller and less common. From a hunter's point of view the habits of the different mullet species are pretty similar, but from what I've seen there are some differences. The so-iuy is a bit prone to fatal mistakes: for example, a school can easily stay overnight in a shallow bay right by the shore, and then you can take the fish "with your bare hands", or it can go into a flooded area to spawn, fail to get out in time and end up trapped. The so-iuy also likes to frolic at the surface and in shallow water, and it has the dorsal fin for it — narrow and low. The Azov sharpnose isn't afraid of very warm water — it comes to the shore to feed even at +30. The flathead prefers cold water, and the golden grey comes to the Crimean shores very rarely. As for size. The so-iuy grows pretty impressive. Some sources say up to 7 kg., others up to 15; in my life I've seen a so-iuy shot by one experienced hunter that weighed 7 kg. and was about a metre long. That fish didn't look much like a mullet. It had darkened a lot, and its big mouth wasn't used just for pulling worms out of the sand — we found a small fish in its stomach! Though that's not surprising, some non-predatory fish become a little carnivorous once they reach a big size. The flathead grows up to 2-3 kg., the other mullet species don't even reach a kilo.

To hunt mullet you need a good warm wetsuit, a gun with a powerful shot, soft rubber fins of medium length and a lot of patience. I dive in a full 7 mm Kyiv-made wetsuit, with a Zelinsky-system gun and simple "Akvanavt" fins. Why a warm wetsuit? Because the only daytime method of hunting mullet is lying in wait. You can dive for 6 hours in basically one spot, and the hunter moves very little, so in a thin suit you freeze. And once you're cold, your breathing goes off and your movements get jerky, which is unacceptable when hunting mullet. The gun should preferably be long; pump it up harder — don't worry, you won't have to shoot into rocks. Ideally the straight shot should be at least 3.5 metres. Why soft fins? The hunting happens at shallow depth — from 2 to 7 metres — and among lots of rocks, and if you clatter against them with plastic fins, you won't see any mullet. Have a lot of patience — if you're hoping to check out the whole area in an hour and quickly shoot some fish, 99 percent it won't be mullet. And it's also good to have experience hunting bream — it's kind of similar.

The first time I saw mullet underwater was 8 years ago near Sudak. Back then, and the next year too, I didn't even manage to take a shot at this fish, which kept rushing past at a long distance. And only in 1994, in the same place, during a night hunt for scorpionfish (more like picking mushrooms with a fork), I saw and shot my first so-iuy. That time the school didn't leave the bay for 3 nights in a row, and a buddy of mine and I really had our fill, as they say. At night the so-iuy is pretty calm. It isn't afraid of light or movement, lets you get very close, if it swims off it lets you follow it and sometimes even comes back to the light by itself. But it's still afraid of unfamiliar sounds, though not as much as in the daytime. The fish stays sleepy even at dawn, when you can already hunt without a torch.