Outdoors : A Russian Ruse? : Anglers Learn That Myth Barely Exceeds Reality in Remote Area of Soviet Union

It sounded like the perfect fish tale: Eurasian salmonids so large--150 pounds or more--and so strong that they couldn’t be landed on rod and reel but had to be blasted out of the water with shotguns.

Or they could be taken by baiting a hook the size of a small anchor with a muskrat, then wrapping the line around a birch sapling until the fish played itself out.

Fact or fantasy? Monsters or myths? Who knew? Who could check? The fish were said to exist only in northeastern Siberia, where no Westerner had ever dunked a line--beyond remote, beyond belief.

So eight Southern California anglers went there last month to see for themselves, in quest of the giant taimen.

Now they’re back, believers, and they’re telling their own whoppers. The taimen are real. They have pictures of their catches to prove it, although not quite in the dimensions described above, and the wonder is that they did it all with fly tackle.

Bob Marriott, proprietor of the Fullerton fly-fishing store that bears his name, led the expedition in cooperation with the Frontiers sports travel group. Their Soviet hosts, let alone the fish, had never seen artificial lures.

“They were giving us a bad time about our little hooks and small rods,” Marriott said.

But the Soviets became believers, too. Five of the anglers caught eight taimen among them. They didn’t use muskrats, although some did use deer-hair mouse/rat imitations up to four inches long. The largest catch was Marriott’s on the final day.

“We pulled up to this sand bar where we were going to be picked up by the helicopter,” he said. “Somewhere earlier, I’d got the mouse bitten off, so I put on a Tropical Punch fly and cast it out.

“As it made the swing, the water just exploded. Roy Beahm (of Newport Beach) was down about 200 feet and said, ‘My God, what was that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try it again.’ The second run through I hooked up.”

And the fight was on.

“I thought that thing would never stop taking backing,” Marriott said.

Fifteen minutes later, he had his fish, all 50 inches and about 35 pounds of it. The weights of most of the catches had to be estimated before the fish were returned to the water.

The anglers didn’t need shotguns but, then, they didn’t see any of the really big ones that were supposed to be down there--only pairs of eyes “six or seven inches apart” following a fly to the surface, then receding back into the depths.

Each day for a week the helicopter would drop them off in pairs at different locations, then collect them downriver at the end of the day. Float-fishing in small, inflatable Russian dinghies, they fished more than a dozen rivers above and below the Arctic Circle but had the best luck on the Tiung and Merchimden rivers northwest of Yakutsk, the capital of the region.

The area is so remote that at one small airport, a young resident asked permission to meet the visitors. He had never seen an American.

The group flew via Moscow to Yakutsk, then left civilization behind and huddled into an aged, single-engine Soviet biplane with bench seats along either side for a 70-m.p.h., 3 1/2-hour trip to the village of Zhigansk, where they stayed in the local hotel and were directed to the community outhouse at the end of a dilapidated boardwalk on the outskirts of town.

Organizers warned that accommodations might be primitive, but Marriott said: “The only areas that were marginal were the accommodations in the towns.”

Camping out was a marked improvement. There the anglers were attended by paid Soviet volunteers.

“They couldn’t really be called guides because they didn’t know any more about the area than we did,” Marriott said. “We just called them boatmen because they handled the boats.”

They also set up the camps and cooked over open fires. The tents, equipped with wood stoves, were warm and comfortable.

Craig Leonard, a Long Beach dentist, liked the pancakes-- blintzes-- with berry sauce, prepared by a trapper called Gonadi, better known in those parts as the Poacher, because he was heavily fined for taking two mink illegally last year. The Soviets also shot a caribou and a moose to supplement the fare.

“They didn’t waste anything,” Leonard said. “The one taimen we killed, they scraped the head, the eyes, everything out. It was all in a cup, and they were eating it.”

The single taimen carcass was kept to bring home as a model for fiberglass trophies. The others were photographed and released, according to the fly-fishing ethic, but also a condition during the four years of negotiations for Frontiers by Bill Davies, the group’s man in the Soviet Union.

“Over the years the Russians had allowed (outsiders) to come in and fish waters that they wouldn’t let the locals fish,” Marriott said. “The (locals) were upset that foreigners could come in and take their food away. The big thing about our trip was that it would be all catch and release.”

Trout Unlimited’s exchange program with the Soviet Union also was a boost, and the trip received the formal blessing of the Russian Society of Hunters and Fishermen.

The lenok, a smaller Siberian game fish that resembles a brown trout and can weigh up to 10 pounds, proved to be an easy mark. The Americans fooled it during blue dun hatches with artificial blue duns, as well as common black woolly buggers and basic streamer patterns.

“Even during a blue dun hatch, other flies would work, so they’re not very picky,” Leonard said.

One day, Earl Young of Brea caught 15 on an artificial mouse.

“They’re real easy to catch,” Marriott said. “Almost as dumb as bass.”

The taimen are tougher, relatively old fish, running about one year to the pound. But they may be less than wary because they haven’t been fished much. Nobody seems to know much about them.

“They can’t find anywhere in the records that there’s ever been a scientific study done on the taimen,” Marriott said. “They don’t know where they make their redds (spawning beds), and they don’t have any true picture of where they migrate to. All they know is that they do not go to the ocean.”

That would be the Arctic Ocean, because Siberian rivers drain northward.

Taimen feed on smaller fish.

“The one we killed, when we opened his gullet, he had three fish in him over 10 inches,” Marriott said.

Herb Sutton of Newport Beach ignored the lenok, figuring he didn’t go to Siberia just to catch something similar to the trout he could catch at home.

“He kept taimen flies on the whole time,” Marriott said. “Never caught one lenok.”

But he did catch three taimen-two more than anyone else. All of them ran between 20 and 35 pounds.

For taimen, the anglers used 8- to 10-weight rods and heavy shock tippets from 40 to 100 pounds. Taimen have sharp teeth, like sharks, and can bite through normal leaders easily.

“Another of the stories we’d heard was about their jumping, but the ones we caught didn’t jump much,” Marriott said.

They also had been told that they would have to work their lures through the lenok near the surface to reach the taimen, which lurked below.

“But we fished all floating lines and short leaders,” Marriott said. “The taimen came to the surface for our lures. It was exciting because you got to see the take--not like bait-fishing down underneath.”

A taimen will fight like a king salmon, with “sulking strength,” Leonard said, but has less bulk.

“The body is cylindrical, like a sturgeon, and when they open their mouth they look like a smallmouth bass,” he said.

“Or a freshwater shark,” Young added.

Marriott is planning another weeklong trip to the Tiung next year.

“Now that we’ve located rivers that are productive, we’ll be able to do a better study of it . . . learn how to read and work the waters. If somebody is looking for a new frontier, there are two fish that can be caught only in Siberia.”

The Americans left most of their gear with their hosts.

“If we’d have been able to stay longer,” Young said, “we’d have had the whole bunch on fly rods.”