I had hard time deciding how I should name this post because until this weekend I had no idea of anything like that existing. Well, I actually heard and read about the famous pond haulings in Southern Bohemia, but I never thought about the English name for this process. I don’t even know whether the whole process is actually called hauling, so let me call it the more common Czech name - výlov rybníku.
The fishermen start at 6 in the morning and work until 3 p.m., for 4 days in a row. It’s a tough job for tough guys. They all drink slivovice in the process but still it must be very exhausting to stand in this freezing water, sorting tons and tons of fish.
What they do is throw out the nets, haul them to the banks and then by hand they pick up the fish from the water into buckets. Their colleagues then sort out the fish into different containers. Most of the fish goes into trucks and is driven away, but some of it is sold on the spot. More on that later.
I enjoyed our trip immensely! Next year I hope to go see the same thing happening at the Rožmberk pond/lake, which is the biggest in the country.
Many people mentioned to me that they made their ways to the ponds upon sunrise. We are way too lazy to do that. We woke up at about 9, had a peaceful breakfast and drove to the pond. It’s only 70km away from our weekend house but the roads are peripheral and so it took us more than an hour to get there, we arrived at about 11:30. We parked our car and walked towards the pond. We were really quite amazed to see that the pond was HUGE, it doesn’t do it right to call it a pond actually, it’s a proper lake.
The fishermen start at 6 in the morning and work until 3 p.m., for 4 days in a row. It’s a tough job for tough guys. They all drink slivovice in the process but still it must be very exhausting to stand in this freezing water, sorting tons and tons of fish.
What they do is throw out the nets, haul them to the banks and then by hand they pick up the fish from the water into buckets. Their colleagues then sort out the fish into different containers. Most of the fish goes into trucks and is driven away, but some of it is sold on the spot. More on that later.
At 2 p.m. the amount of people attending dropped significantly and we decided to go too. It was very cold that day and we were freezing by then. Of course we couldn’t leave without buying some fish. We bought a 5kg catfish. There was a huge variety of live fish on sale. I thought that it‘s somewhat depressing that in a country with such vast ponds and lakes all we get to buy in supermarkets is local trout and carp. Even in Makro the selection of fresh water fish is small. One of the carps in the box weighed 6kg!!!
I enjoyed our trip immensely! Next year I hope to go see the same thing happening at the Rožmberk pond/lake, which is the biggest in the country.
The next post will feature food!
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