“I thought it was a wels catfish, but instead…”

It had a dreadful mouth, with many teeth, and a body that to hold it in your arms you had to hug as it was a girlfriend. And indeed, it was female. We are speaking about the pike that two weeks ago was brought to shore by two friends who in Cadrezzate, a village near the lake of Monate (a lake in Varese), captured an animal of seven kilos, and one metre and seven centimetres long.

And these are not fishermen’s tales, in order to see the bite, at night on the lake, during fishing trips,“starlights”, the phosphorescent floats are used. Indeed, 15 days ago Matteo Rogiani, 28, had just placed his fishing line, when he saw the float moving in a strange way. “I was fishing with live baits, I was using a 100 grammes rudd clasped to the hook with the dorsal fin. The float moved when I placed the rod. Then it disappeared and went away for a minute. Immediately afterwards it emerged again and I gave thread. At this point I looked at my partner, I said him: ‘What can I do?’ and without waiting for the answer I pulled.” Really, this is the result of a night of wels catfish fishing, that brought to the shore a completely different prey. In reality the ideal season for the fishing of this animal opens in 20 days or so, when the water warms and fish moves more.

“I realised it was a pike, because at a certain point, inside the darkness, it jumped out of the water: a fantastic thing, maybe it was ten o’clock. Only at that moment I realised which kind of animal I had caught.” The fishing equipment did its duty, the rod for the carps resisted and the hook was linked to the fishing line with a thread of steel; it was impossible for the pike to break it.

Matteo explains “It is the greatest pike of my life and the most unexpected. Often it happens to take some eels, but such large pikes, instead of wels catfish, absolutely not. What did you do with the fish? “I entrusted it to my friend, a butcher, who transformed it in fillets, in part already cooked, in part frozen.” And if was it a wels catfish? “The wels catfish can be eaten if weights less than three kilos; I met friends, Romanian fishermen who take them in order to eat them; it is a part of their cooking tradition and they confirm that under a certain weight they are good, while over it, the meat becomes leathery. I choose another rule; I eat any fish caught in the lake of Monate, but if I go somewhere else, noto .”