The practice of catching zander. Kuzmin Konstantin

From the author.
Passion for fishing is not the worst of the flaws inherent in men
At least ten million of our fellow citizens are fond of fishing in one way or another. For some, this occupation is nothing more than entertainment, for others it is a refuge from family problems, for others it is a second profession, an additional source of livelihood.

Regardless of which of these three groups you consider yourself to be, one way or another, information about reservoirs, fish and methods of catching them is of undoubted interest to you. We receive the lion's share of such information from our friends and acquaintances or our own experience, although ideally, specialized magazines and books should play the leading role in satisfying the information hunger.
The real state of affairs with printed publications for anglers is very depressing. In Russia, only the magazine "Rybolov" is published consistently, and in the past few years - "Rybolov-Club" and "Rybolov-Elite". Other attempts were made to found journals in the same direction, but they did not stand the test of time.
Books are even worse. The publishing boom that swept the country at the climax of perestroika was expressed in the unmotivated over-hyping of the book by L.P. Sabaneev "Fish of Russia", the "bible" of the Russian fisherman. As a result of the crisis of overproduction, this masterpiece of the classics has turned from a scarce edition into a warehouse filler.

In addition, a number of Moscow and especially regional publishing houses have diversified the stream of fiction they produce with outwardly solid books with obligatory titles like "All About Fishing". Usually, in their imprint, instead of the names of the authors, the faceless names of the compilers appeared. Opening any of these books on an arbitrary page, you can experience a burning sensation of "deja vu", because all of them in fact turn out to be compiled from fragments haphazardly plucked from books and magazines from the times of developed socialism.
However, against the background of all this squalor, several pleasant exceptions can be distinguished, bearing a fundamental novelty, the depth of the study of the topic and the author's professionalism.
However, I would not act as a literary critic. I just wanted to draw your attention to the severity of the problem. Indeed, in any large European country, it is published according to several magazines for fishing enthusiasts. Most of them are head and shoulders above their Russian counterparts both in form and content. The same applies to books on recreational fishing - and here the comparison, both qualitative and quantitative, is clearly not in our favor.
However, everything is by no means hopeless. The experience accumulated by Russian fishermen deserves to be passed on not by word of mouth, but in a more civilized way. Therefore, let's not refer to the high cost of printing, the difficult economic situation in the country and other "objective" difficulties - all this is being overcome - if only there was an initiative. The brochure "Spinning: Hunting for Asp", published in 1993, my first experience in this field, reflected not so much a desire to fill a vacuum in the fishing literature market, but a desire for freedom and independence. For publications in periodicals, firstly, are sharply limited in volume, and secondly, the sacramental "to be continued" causes the reader more negative emotions than positive ones.

However, the main problem of newspaper and magazine publications is excessive editorial editing, due to which the individual author's style is suppressed by the refined style of the editor. Moreover, incompetent editing often gives rise to fundamental errors.

Some ten years ago, in Rural Life, I saw a note about catching pike on a foam rubber fish, after reading which I thought that only a patient of the Kashchenko institution could write such a thing. But the most piquant thing was discovered when it dawned on me that my name was under the text!

Indeed, once I sent a few notes about fishing to the newspaper. One of them, or rather three or four key words from it, served as the basis for the nonsense that was offered to readers. Remember Mark Twain's story "How I edited the Agricultural Gazette" - I would never have believed that such a thing was possible in real life, if it had not happened to me ...

Perhaps potential authors of books about fishing are stopped by the fear of creating a lot of freeloader competitors. When you read some publications, you catch yourself thinking that if they tell you the truth, then not all of it. It is understandable: not everyone will voluntarily agree to make their “know-how” obtained by hard work the property of everyone and everyone, without receiving practically Nothing.

Fears of this kind were expressed to me by my acquaintances, specialists in asp, to whom I gave the manuscript of "Hunting for Asp" four years ago to read. "Not only will you not get any benefit from this book; the most unpleasant thing is that the Oka will be filled with numerous "teapots" who are suffering to catch asps, who will only get in the way of us, professionals," oral reviews were invariably accompanied by such a comment. "Asp hunting". Indeed, over the past couple of seasons, the number of contenders for the capture of asp has increased markedly, but I do not think that the small book with a green cover has become the main reason for this. Although it actually gives instructions on how to catch asp (act like this - and you will catch it!), Many anglers familiar with the book continue to surprise with their ignorance and inability to learn from someone else's experience. And only a significant minority managed to learn from the "Hunting for Asp" something useful for practical application. Thus, I see no particular reason to classify my “know-how” as secrecy.

The idea to write about the asp arose spontaneously - after it pushed all other predators into the background for me for two or three seasons. Pike perch, unlike asp, has not taken the unconditional first place in my catches in the last fifteen years. Moreover, there were years when I did not engage in his special fishing at all. Nevertheless, the idea to write separately about pike perch, I hatched for a long time. True, at first only a voluminous chapter was conceived in a large book on spinning. Now, having a positive experience of "Asp Hunting", I decided to go the same way, that is, to write a book entirely devoted to zander.

It seems that "The practice of catching zander" will be of interest to a wider range of anglers than "Hunting for asp". Firstly, because zander is more common in the waters of central Russia. Secondly, it is generally accepted that catching asp is a much more difficult task than catching zander;

therefore, many spinningists - both beginners and experienced ones - simply ignore the asp, as if such a fish does not exist for them at all, while everyone is trying to catch pike perch.

We note, however, that catching zander is simple only outwardly and contains many subtle subtleties that can most decisively affect its result.

Initially, I did not set myself the task of creating something like an encyclopedia, which would reflect all aspects of catching zander with spinning. A similar approach is typical for any highly specialized publications. In all such books, it is primarily about the author's methods of catching fish, with which the reader has every right to either agree or not. That is why you will not find peremptory statements in them that you need to catch such and such a fish only this way and nothing else - perhaps someone does the same thing better.

I can even assume that the book that you are now holding in your hands will have a lot of harsh critics from among the professional gossipers, who, undoubtedly, are more numerous in Moscow than experts in catching asp. However, so far in our country no one has written anything intelligible about catching pike perch with a spinning rod - at least in a comparable volume and in such detail. Therefore, I consider myself entitled to give out the first pancake, even if, in your opinion, it turns out to be lumpy. Indeed, leaf through the files of Rybolov and its analogues, look through any of the fishing books published over the past half century - and you will find a lot of materials about pike perch, but I'm sure they will leave you with the same aftertaste as from tasting cheap cognac, poured from one barrel into different bottles. In most of the available publications, a good half of the volume is occupied by descriptive information that is of little interest to anyone: how pike perch looks different from other fish, how many scales it has in the lateral line, how the sacrament of spawning is performed, and the like. You probably won’t confuse pike perch with barracuda, knowing the number of scales is just as important for you as the number of stamens in a flower of some rhododendron, and the interest in intimate details from the life of a pike perch is not fed by the one with spinning, but the one with sharp…

There are, however, individual fans of spinning who do not disdain to indulge in spear or bullshit, but there are few of them. The angler, even being an ace of sport fishing, loses all his prestige, descending to frankly poaching gear. The temptation of easy and almost always unpunished gain has spawned in recent years a lot of adherents of