Gone fishing

Gone fishing

With his ice awls hanging around his neck, Mikko Rönni is the first to step onto frozen Lake Ansa. Rönni is closely followed by Tauno Huhtamo and Veli-Pekka Veistämö carrying an ice pick and a reel. They have travelled 40 kilometres from Tampere to Veistämö’s holiday home in Pälkäne. For many years now, the group has spent many a winter’s morning on the lake fishing with nets.

A couple of hundred metres from the shore, a pine twig sticks out of the ice. This marks the hole through which the fishing net has been lowered into the water. The hole has frozen over again, but Huhtamo breaks the ice with a couple of strokes of his ice pick. Some twenty metres away, Rönni does the same at the other opening.

A Catch of Biblical Proportions

Veistämö starts to raise the fishing net slowly out of the water. It's a good catch, several pike and a few large, red-finned perch.

“Here comes a whopper,” cries Tauno Huhtamo. A pike, the most common predator in inland lakes, is pulled out of the icy water, weighing over a kilo. The fisherman’s fingers are starting to go numb and turn blue, but Huhtamo does not seem to notice. He concentrates on freeing the pike from the net with great care, having first knocked it unconscious.

About one third of the total catch in Finland and almost 90 per cent of the inland catch is caught by recreational fishermen. A significant proportion of the fish eaten by Finns is self-caught.

Recreational fishing is an important nature activity for over two million Finns, in other words, for about 40 per cent of the population. The total annual catch made by recreational fishermen is about 50 million kilos, of which almost half is caught in nets. The most important types of fish caught by r in terms of quantity are perch, pike and roach. Recreational fishing is concentrated near large residential areas and areas in southern Finland with lots of summer cottages, Finland's Lake District, with thousands of lakes dotting the landscape.

After fishing, the men start a camp fire and take out rations of grill sausage, and soon the savoury snacks, skewered on wooden sticks, are cooking over the fire. They are in no hurry to be anywhere else.


BY KATI LEPPÄLAHTI
PHOTOS BY SEPPO SAMULI