Big Fish Still Get Slaughtered...

Hi all!

This post will be quite grim, and I already warn my readers abroad:This post has a link to a big dead carp... Yet again, Finns have been skillful enough to fill lakes with all-killing gill nets. They are commonly using them to catch "trophy fish". This makes no sense at all - a fish caught with a gill net requires no skill at all. It just kills everything that swims in it. Even our Saimaa ringed seal.

That's enough of the almost-extinct endemic seal species - and on with the ramblings about carp. So a carp that was claimed to be the biggest fish in Finland was caught and killed. To the catchers excuse, he wasn't actually trying to catch a carp. To make things worse, the biggest tench in Finland was ALSO caught a few weeks ago with a gill net. This tench was caught and killed intentionally. Just to claim the record. What a sporty way of catching record fish! Yay!

Big fish are really important to the ecosystem in numerous ways. It is really important to release them every time it's possible. 

A nice common carp going back to do what he/she does best (that is being a big fish).

Ps. The carp in the magazine was claimed to be "closer to 50kg than 20 kg..." Yeah - right.

It's Not Just About The Carp...

Writing a blog about carp fishing in Finland is somewhat of a masochistic task. Most Finnish fishermen are not interested in carp or coarse fishing in general, so writing in Finnish wasn't what I wanted to do. The interested few ones are the reason for writing. Getting new anglers to adopt right fish handling techniques and ethos in carp fishing is something I am happy doing.

I have been asking myself once in a while, why should I encourage more people fishing for carp. Eventually I am just ruining my own happiness of fishing alone on these lakes. So why all the noise and hype of something that would be best kept as a secret? 

I started fishing exclusively for coarse fish because a lot of fish species are endangered and some close to extinction. For example, there WERE about 30 salmon rivers in Finnish coastline of The Baltic Sea, now the number is 2 or 3 (based on opinion). Only one of these rivers has a decent population of its genetically original salmon. The situation is really grim. The same goes with sea trout and our inland trout stocks. It is just horrible, so I decided not to take part in fishing these species until the stocks are healthy.

Why should I be a part of the horde of Finnish fishermen who think salmonids are the ultimate catch? Afterall, a lot of the salmon-related fish also end up in the fry pan after the fishing trips... My personal choice was to start fishing specimen-sized coarse fish, which ended up as a carp  madness. So when someone chuckles about my catches of "overgrown roach", I raise an eyebrow and know better. The best way of protecting salmon and trout can be diversifying the Finnish fishing culture and getting people to spend more time chasing carp rather than trout or salmon. 

And yes, now some trout-fanatic says that if no one fishes for trout, there will be no people fighting for the species survival. In my honest opinion, you can fish for coarse fish and still be a spokesman for trout and salmon. That is what I have been doing.

An unlucky salmon. I caught her with my excellent fly fishing skills (hooked from her tail). While unhooking her, we discovered she had a commercial fishing hook in her mouth... Of course we removed the commercial hook and released her.  Maybe, just maybe salmon are being fished a bit too much.