Pikeless Delta

I don't usually go fishing after the end of October. I don't mind the cold, generally, but on the boat, in those misty mornings, the humidity can reach inside your bones and send those definite shivers down your spine.

Now that the days are way smaller than during the summer, life in the Delta is slowing down. Only some amateur fishermen, like me, are visiting the Delta, hoping that they will get that break in catching a big one. But the big ones are not that often sighted anymore. The fish in the water is getting more and more scarce and the ones on the table are smaller and smaller with every year that passes by. We like to fish but in our struggle for abundance we will find ourselves alone, cruising on top of empty waters.

I'm here for the pikes guys. I wasn't a pike lover until this year, I usually fish in the deep, waiting. Spinning for me is a new thing that I started to get organised at, only this year. It's a totally different type of fishing and this game is all about the lure and your availability to throw it and recover it, all day long. If you think that fishing is not a sport, try throwing the lure for 30 minutes. I bet your shoulders will throw some curses at you after that.

Evening are too short now and staying on the river until the darkness falls is not something that one choses when he goes fishing here, it's something that just happens. You get to the accomodation when the night is already settled in and the wild dogs are starting their choir hauls. Over here there's also a space problem with the boat parkings. In the center of Sulina, there's hardly any place left to redeem it for your boat. Docking is generally done by connecting, in parallel, with other boats and you prey to God that you've tied it well enough so that the waves produced by the moving boats wonts rock it too hard, banging it against the pier or against the boat that it's tied up to.

The pikes were not abundant this time... or so I've been told, because I have absolutely no experience in spinning. It seems that during the spring there was a special phenomenon that happened together with the level of the water rising: all of the old water of the lakes was taken out because of the rising water and together with it, it forced the majority of the pike population to get out in the big river and travel upstream. There were rumors on the bar of the place that we were staying in, that in Galați, one of the last cities on the road of the Danube to the sea, this was a hell of a year to catch pikes, even though in general they are pretty rare over there. This year's legend goes to the extent that a kid with an old spinner took out 50 kilograms of pike in under one hour, in Galați.

Now I don't know if that's true but for sure we've felt the lack of pikes in the river this time.

I was supposed to go again during December but the weather is already too cold for my taste and It's really not a pleasant thing get frozen while fishing... no matter the amount of vodka.