At least once in your life, literally every fisherman who wants to test his tackle for strength and get a fair dose of adrenaline dreams of measuring strength with a captured specimen of catfish. After all, this fish is one of the largest representatives of the underwater world.
You can catch a small catfish almost everywhere where there is no very strong flow of water. Small individuals of this fish are found in pits, in shallow water and even on a significantly flat place. As for the large ones, they need to be searched at great depths, where there are blockages of trunks of old trees, snags or crumbling steep banks.
Catfish is a very strong fish, and taking into account its possible sizes, which on the Lower Volga can reach up to 120 kilograms, after biting the fight will be quite difficult. Based on this, tackle for catching catfish should be serious.
First of all, this concerns the rod, which when bottom fishing should be metal or fiberglass, reinforced with rings and two hundred gram test, have a length of up to three and a half meters.
The presence of the test in the tackle for catching catfish is explained by the fact that usually the flow in many pits is capable of pulling even 120-gram loads, which literally in ten to twenty minutes are somewhere under the snags, from where it is already impossible to extract them. That is why the snap must be clearly fixed at the bottom.
It is best to install an inertial reel on the rod , so that with the help of powerful traction and a regulated clutch, you can confidently fight even with large catfish.
Catfish tackle should be equipped with forged single hooks, large doubles or tees. You can choose a sliding sinker, attach a swivel to it, and secure the leash a little higher. The bait for such tackle for catching catfish is cutting from fish - asp, rudd, scavenger, as well as frogs, offal, worms and bears.
Place for fishing should be chosen directly at the pit, edge or shallows. The main hours of fishing are morning, evening and night, in a word, when the catfish feeds intensely.
Tackles for catching catfish from the shore are installed vertically, on a special stand, in order to minimize the impact of the current on the fishing line. And in order for the catfish not to drag away fishing gear, it is necessary to loosen the friction brake.
In addition to bottom fishing gear , catfish can also be caught spinning, using oscillating baubles such as large jigs with vibro-tails or twisters, almost 20 centimeters in length, as well as plastic baits with internal loading.
One of the most interesting is fishing from a floating boat - "floating".
The fishing gear for catfish in this case is a one-handed spinning rod and a reel with a large drum. Sometimes a winter type of gear is also used, having a cork or reed handle, which is convenient in order to throw it into the water during a strong jerk of a barbel and then easily catch it.
Another type of tackle for catching catfish is quack fishing, which was popular in the recent past, then it was pushed into the background by spinning, but today this method is successfully spreading again.
Quok itself is an instrument made from certain types of wood, which, upon impact, has the ability to create vibrations of sound that attract catfish. Its main criterion is the purity and sonority of sound in a collision with water.
This original fishing has not changed much over the years, and today the fisherman has exactly the same quack in his hands as his grandfather. You just need to correctly change the amplitude of the impact on the water and the angle of entry.
Many avid hunters of underwater barbel hunting, having caught a small individual, simply release it back in the hope of catching a large specimen, the fight with which gives a truly inexplicable pleasure, not to mention pride in the captured trophy.