Fish trophies

Fifth World Championship in Boat Predatory Spinning and Lure Fishing finished in the Dnipro delta, Kherson oblast. The winner is Ukraine. The second and third place was taken correspondingly by Poland and Russia. For two days teams from 13 countries (Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Ireland, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, and South Africa) competed for the honorary title of champion of 2012. In a tough fight, the Ukrainian team of fishermen in the last minutes of the competition snatched victory from the Poles, beating them by only four points. This is the second time Ukrainian team won the main trophy in this type of fishing sport. Last time Ukrainian fishermen were just as lucky was in 2009 at the competition in Kazakhstan.

Unlike in the previous championships, this time the winning team was selected according to the new rules: not by the weight of the caught fish, but by the total length of the fish trophies. “This was done to avoid all sorts of issues (for example, the inaccuracy of the balance reading on water and so on). On the other hand, a real fisherman is the one, who will manage to catch more fish, and not necessarily the one who will catch one big fish,” said Vitalii Levchenko, president of the Federation of Fishing Sports of Ukraine to The Day. The catch was measured right in the boat, where beside the two fishermen there was also a judge. The fish was measured from head to tail and the results of the team from two days were summed up. Credit was given only to certain species of fish: perch (from 30 cm), pike (from 40 cm), pikeperch (from 47 cm), asp (from 35 cm), catfish (from 75 cm), and chub (from 25 cm).

“The biggest fish we caught in the two days of competition was an 87-cm-long pike that weighed about six kilograms,” said Oleh Konovalov, coach of the Ukrainian team to The Day. Ukrainian team caught about 20 pikes, but, as they joke, only the last three carps helped them to pull out the victory.

“The main goal of the competition is not just to identify the most skilled fishermen but to also attract public attention to the environmental problems,” Serhii Bleskun, veteran fisherman and commercial director of Nemiroff (which sponsored the championship) explained the main purpose of the Championship. Therefore, as he said, all the competitions in sport fishing are organized according to the principle of “not killing the caught fish.” The fish catch is released back into the delta of the Dnipro right after the measurements are taken.