Ice Fishing Remains a Hot Hobby in Cold Russia

Legions of men troop into Moscow’s Rizhsky train station in the predawn darkness every winter weekend, wearing felt boots and carrying giant drills.

Only the earliest risers witness the invasion of the ice fishermen. Oblivious to temperatures often below zero, these rugged Russians are bound for the birch-lined rivers and reservoirs outside the smoggy capital.

“Real winter weather!” exulted a burly man named Anatoly, greeting his fishing buddies aboard the train on a particularly bitter Sunday.

Braced by the coldest winter in years, ice fishing enthusiasts across Russia are hooked on a national pastime that remains a rare constant from czarist times to today’s post-Soviet disarray.

This traditional rite of winter, like swimming in icy ponds, seems the perfect marriage of Russians’ legendary stoicism and their glacial weather.

Where else would someone like Anatoly endure a three-hour, one-way commute by subway, train and unheated bus just to sit over a small hole in the ice all day?

Russian ice fishermen--and the vast majority are men--make do without the fancy equipment used in the West. None of that shirt-sleeve fishing in heated shanties.

On weekends, prime fishing spots outside the city are dotted with hundreds of bundled-up enthusiasts, sitting on tackle boxes and peering at holes they have drilled in the thick ice.

The hardest-core fishermen can be found every day on the Moscow River, devoting hours to catching 4-inch-long fish. Later, they’ll hang them to dry for use as snacks with beer--or feed them to their cats.

“They say every fourth fish caught in the Moscow River is contaminated,” says Yegor Sukhanenkov, a 55-year-old retired carpenter, yanking out an undersized perch with his miniature rod.

“That’s why we are using our cat as an experiment,” he quips. “So far, he’s still alive.”

Fishermen may drill dozens of tiny holes in a day in their quest to land the perch, bream, catfish, pike, even sturgeon that inhabit local waters. Some tell tales of whoppers that wouldn’t fit through the ice.

Nikolai Frolov takes no such chances. On every free day, the 45-year-old construction worker carves out a 7-foot-long trench under a bridge in the western suburb of Krylatskoye. Then he paces slowly up and down it with his pole and lure for hours, “just to relax.”

“I love the fresh air,” he says, icicles hanging from his mustache, the earflaps of his fur hat down because of the arctic wind. “My wife understands that after I spend the whole week working, I need one or two days to get some rest.”

Just upriver, 67-year-old Mikhail Yevseyev, who’s struggling to get by on his monthly pension of 230,000 rubles ($48), says he exists on bread and water and lives for fishing.

“I come every day when the fish are biting”--unless he wants to drink, he says. “It’s the worst thing to drink when you’re ice fishing. A drunk could freeze to death.”

That’s not the only hazard. During midwinter thaws and the approach of spring, dozens of fishermen fall in or float away on breakaway chunks of ice.