Vlad Rekovski - Manage your dream. Your opportunities are endless

When we lived in Salzgitter, we often caught carp with my brother Dmitry. Fishing without a special permit in Germany is prohibited, for this you need to take special training courses for a fisherman and pass an exam. Only after that you need to pay an annual fee of 150 DM ( today it is 150 euros ) and you can freely fish on all lakes. There are exceptions, but this applies to private reservoirs where fish are bred on purpose – fishing there is paid.

But what does it mean to “fish freely”? There are restrictions on the number and types of fish you can catch. To track this, a special fish log was introduced, which should always be with you during fishing. When you catch a fish, you must first measure it without removing the hook. If the size of the fish exceeds the minimum allowed for fishing, it must be stunned with a special device and only then put into the fishing chest by removing the hook. In the event that the fish caught by you does not meet the standard in size, then it must be released by carefully removing the hook. Fisherman courses are taught how to do this. We, of course, like real Russians, tried to comply with all the above rules and only in extreme cases and very rarely did we not have time to enter the caught carp in the register.

Once in the evening, when Max was three years old, we caught two good carps for an hour, but despite the fact that on that day we had already reached the limit on the number, we decided to sit with a fishing rod a little longer. As we joked in such cases: “Let’s cast the line for another half an hour, we’ll just wet the bait!” And so we pull out a huge carp – it was really a “huge carp”, weighing seven kilograms! I still have that photo in which my son Max, and next to me I keep the same carp. The fish’s tail touches the ground, and the head is slightly higher than Max. Well, we just had nowhere to write down this monster in our brother’s journal, and we could not release it back into the lake.

Today is already 2018, and my son comes to me in Russia every year during the summer holidays. He studied at the University of Braunschweig and this year he transferred to Munich after completing an internship at the BMW plant. My son loves traveling just like me. Sometimes he will load his travel essentials into his small car, including his bicycle, and after that he can travel 800 kilometers through southern Europe in three to four days and visit several cities. He loves to be outdoors. When he is with me in Russia, I prepare in advance and thoroughly, I plan our upcoming trip with him. It has already become a tradition that we go to a river or lake for several days every year. I have everything I need for outdoor recreation: a boat, a boat motor, a combined tent with three sleeping compartments and a spacious entrance hall, a gas burner, all kinds of dishes and everything else that is necessary for a full-fledged long-term stay in nature. A year ago, in 2017, I prepared a real challenge for us. We had to go on an electric train with all our equipment to the north from Nizhny Novgorod, get off at the Vetluzhskaya station, which is 400 meters from the Vetluga River, and raft in the opposite direction along the river for four days – towards Nizhny Novgorod, without having a tent. I want to talk about this in a little more detail.

Rafting on Vetluga

It was an incredibly warm September. My son flew to Nizhny Novgorod in the midst of a golden and very hot autumn, atypical for this area. The temperature during the day reached plus 30 degrees, and at night the air quickly cooled to plus 10 degrees. Our path lay north. At about 11 o’clock in the morning we got off, or rather, got off the train at the Vetluzhskaya station, which is 160 kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod. Lined with backpacks and bags with fishing rods, the two of us carried a huge bag in which there were two boats: one was for us and fishing, and the other was a cargo boat for provisions and everything else. We decided to take a taxi to the river, of which there were more than a dozen at the station. We ended up on the shore, paying 200 rubles and driving 500 meters. There was no wind at all, it was completely calm, the sun was warming as it happens in summer. We quickly prepared our boats for rafting, loaded everything, organized a small snack and set off.

At that time it was about 12 noon. We let loose the lines of the spinning and moved downstream. We threw baits along the banks of the Vetluga in anticipation of a bite. Our goal was to overcome in three days about 50 kilometers along the stream and go ashore near the village of Voskresenskoye, where the river comes close to the settlement. I planned to find a car in the village that could take us to the nearest train station, which was about 30 kilometers away.

We looked at the beautiful banks and talked about various topics while moving along the river. Previously, I marked on the map the places where I planned to stay for the night. During the day, we did not go ashore without special need, except for picking mushrooms for making mushroom soup in the evening. We set up a dining room on our boating boat. Pulling the second boat by the rope to the main boat, we could, using a gas stove installed on a special table, heat up the soup cooked in the evening in a kettle, prepare a salad of vegetables, and also boil water for coffee and tea. During all the preparations for lunch or tea break, we constantly moved with the flow and did not waste precious time, since the distance that we had to travel in a day was precisely calculated based on our speed of movement.

In the evenings it began to get dark early – twilight sets in very quickly in this area at the beginning of autumn, and it became dark already in half an hour after the beginning of sunset. For this reason, no later than six o’clock, we had to go ashore and prepare everything needed for an overnight stay: set up camp, dry the boats, collect firewood for the night and start cooking dinner before it gets dark. After all these preparations, one could calmly enjoy nature, cook dinner on the fire and just sit by the fire and chat.

And at the end of the first day, I realized that the number of mosquitoes in these forests exceeds my expectations. There were a huge number of them, mosquitoes immediately began to bite as soon as they touched the surface of the body. We quickly got dressed and proceeded to step by step preparation for the night. Everything had to be done very quickly, because twilight, as I have already mentioned, at this time of year comes within forty minutes.

First, it was necessary to unload all the things from both boats, and the boats themselves should be pulled out of the water and left to dry – the boats served as our beds.

Second: it was necessary to find two suitable trees, between which we will later lay the boats turned upside down, where our sleeping places will be. We fixed the pole between the trees at a height of one and a half meters. The pole served as the basis for stretching the film. Thus, we prepared an analogue of a tent from improvised means.

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