An explorer biography
Chen Tao
Sea fishing explorers
In October 2019, Canada caught a 1,049-pound bluefin gold gun, the largest bluefin gold gun in the country
In November 2019, Tanzania caught a 123 kg (about 271 lb) dog tooth gold gun, a world record of 265 lbs
Sharks love to "rob"?
Swimming with an Amazon piranha?
King crab on the pound to nibble, caviar to eat until vomit
A million bluefin golden guns actually chopped into stuffed dumplings?
……
In the past 15 years, Chen Tao, a sea fishing master who has fished in 62 countries and regions, has made a guest appearance on the "Cattle Man" program to reveal the mystery of sea fishing!
01 "Compete for prey" with sharks, and the result is ...
Shark fishing is too dangerous for many people, right?
However, as a sea fishing enthusiast, this is a common thing, and the reason is quite unjust, because it loves "robbery" too much!
"We never wanted to go shark fishing, but sharks always came and ate the fish we were catching, and finally the hook hooked it, which is a lot of times."
Chen Tao once caught a fish, and everyone had been tugging with it for 40 minutes, looking to take it down, only to be bitten by the shark, leaving only a head. The head of the fish is more than 46 pounds, and it is estimated that with the body, the whole fish is about 150 pounds.
A shark that can bite a fish of more than 100 kilograms to a shark with only one head left must be at least more than 600 kilograms.
"Sharks are dangerous, but as long as you don't jump into the sea, they're safe. Others worry about fish jumping up and stabbing people to death, which is less likely than the chances of falling from a flowerpot on the balcony and killing people. ”
The real danger of sea fishing is actually that when going out to sea, people accidentally fall into the sea and are not found. For such safety matters, the tour leader must carefully explain to everyone before departure.
Other things that need to be noted is that some people, out of freshness and curiosity, will directly catch fish with their hands, and are often easily punctured by the dorsal fin and backstab of the fish, some of which are poisonous. However, there are very few highly poisonous fish.
In addition to sharks, in the process of fishing, there are also piranhas that are misunderstood.
02 Swim with piranhas?
Didn't expect you to be such an Amazon!
Before going to the Amazon for the first time, Chen Tao specially made a lot of preparations: all the team members were vaccinated against yellow fever and malaria, and brought various medicines, a whole box.
Arriving in the Amazon, the first thing that stunned everyone was a group of small children bathing in the water, while not far from the shore, many dried and dead piranhas, with open mouths and sharp teeth.
"Aren't these kids afraid of being bitten?" Everyone has doubts in their hearts.
After careful understanding, Chen Tao learned that piranhas are not as terrible as in film and television works, if they are really hungry and have no food, they will initially attack each other and eat the same kind. At this time, if an animal goes to that water to drink water, and there are wounds on its body that arouse its desire to attack, it will really bite.
But biting is unlikely to happen right up, and it basically only happens in extreme cases.
"When fishing the next day, everyone was still nervous in the morning, afraid that there were piranhas in the water; By the afternoon, everyone was standing in the water; That night, the crowd was already swimming at the camp gate. ”
Piranhas have not only become a prop for everyone to take pictures, but also a delicacy among the population.
Another thing that surprised Chen Tao and others at the Amazon camp was that there were no mosquito bites!
This is mainly due to the wisdom of the local camp site selection, three or four meters next to it, there are a lot of mint trees, which play a role in repelling mosquitoes, and the captain sleeps directly in the hammock, without even a mosquito net.
March, April and September and October of each year are the dry season in the Amazon, where the water flow is small and the fish population is relatively concentrated, which is suitable for fishing.
Due to the clear dry and rainy seasons, Chen Tao especially likes to take the group to fish near the equatorial line, such as Vanuatu, marshall islands, Seychelles, Maldives, etc. These areas basically belong to the windless zone during the dry season, and there are few big winds and waves in the sea, unlike the Nordic region, where the wind and waves are large, not only easy to get seasick, but also the risk of going to sea.
03 Millions worth of bluefin gold guns
Can't escape the frying, stewing, chopping and stuffing dumplings?
In October 2019, Chen Tao and his party spent 5.5 hours to catch a bluefin gold gun about 3.6 meters long and weighing 1,049 pounds (about 950 pounds) in Canada.
"This fish should be the largest in the Chinese fishing record, and is worth 1 million to 1.5 million according to the domestic market value."
Theoretically, a person can catch fish that weighs 5, 10 or even 20 times their weight. However, this nearly a thousand pounds of bluefin golden gun really tossed everyone enough.
In general fish, it is enough to use the waist and arms, but to catch large fish, it is necessary to use the thighs, calves and hip muscles. Moreover, with the fish "tug-of-war", opposition is not feasible, can only consume its physical strength.
The first round was played by 6 players in turn, and each of them only lasted a few minutes to ten minutes, barely surviving for more than an hour. Immediately after the second and third rounds, all 6 people were paralyzed. Chen Tao took the fishing rod and insisted on it for another hour and a half. Later, even the boatman joined the rod pulling team, tired to the point of out of phase, but still could not resist.
The captain had to call his brother from another boat by radio to come and help, and continued to fight for half an hour before finally pulling the fish up.
"The closer this big fish is to the water, the closer it is to the boat, the more dangerous it is. Because the fishing line at this time is very tight, it cannot be forced, and it will break as soon as it is forced. ”
The moment the fish came out of the water, the boat erupted into a cry of excitement and revelry.
In Canada, there are three ways to play fishing for bluefin golden guns: one is to catch only no fish, charter boats; The second is to pull the fish up and take a picture with it after fishing, but the fish does not belong to you, in this case, in addition to the boat fee, you also have to pay a part of the fee to the captain; The third is that you have bought the quota and are free to dispose of the fish.
"The government stipulates that local fishing boats are only allowed to catch one bluefin golden gun a year, which is called a quota. Quotas cost money to buy, and the price varies from year to year, between $20,000 and $30,000. ”
The bluefin golden gun is a valuable fish species, so a sea fishing trip costs more. But if you only want to experience sea fishing, the threshold is not high. "Our fishing trips to foreign countries are the cheapest 6,000 yuan, most of which are 10,000 to 20,000 yuan, and eating, living and fishing are all included."
This million-dollar, nearly 1,000-kilogram bluefin golden gun was finally eaten one by one by everyone in various ways, braised, stewed, roasted, shabu-shabu, fried, and even chopped into stuffed dumplings to eat.
Eating all kinds of luxurious top ingredients has a lot to do with local regulations and the way fishing grounds operate.
04 Caviar, king crab eat until vomit
It turns out that the business philosophy of foreign fishing grounds is very different
"I have personally seen a team member eat five king crabs at a meal, nearly twenty pounds, remove the shell weight, about three or four pounds of leg meat."
"There are also salmon, which have seeds in the stomach and caviar every day, and can eat it disgustingly."
Because the "food" of the catch cannot be taken away, the anglers will feast on the local area.
Chen Tao once tried to ask the person in charge of the Russian camp if he could let the team members return home with some king crab and caviar, but the other party replied seriously:
"We've been in business for 12 years, and countless people from all over the world have come here, but not a single person has taken a fish or a crab out of this. We have this resource, and we are very welcome to eat it, and if we can't finish eating, we will let it go, and we will never allow it to be taken away. ”
Not only that, in order to ensure the sustainable use of resources, the camp also has strict control over the number of receptions, and will not overdraft uncontrollably in order to make more money.
In contrast, Chen Tao reflected on the business model of relevant fishing grounds and scenic spots in China, and the use of resources was almost extinct, only looking at immediate interests and not caring about long-term development. At the beginning, there were all the resources, and a group of people went to play for two years, and there was nothing left.
On how to improve this issue, Chen Tao believes that we must first start from the legislative level.
For example, the Yangtze River is banned from fishing, and at the same time, the sale of aquatic products of the Yangtze River is prohibited. Whether this measure can put an end to the phenomenon of overfishing and overfishing, at least gradually let everyone realize that the fish in the Yangtze River cannot be fished casually.
Second, practitioners must have the awareness of consciously protecting the ecology.
There is a world-renowned sailfish fishing ground, and local fishermen have formed a conventional rule: when you catch this fish, you must release it, and you are not allowed to kill it, and you are not allowed to eat it.
If you accidentally catch it, you can take a picture and put it in the sea after taking it. In order to ensure that it can continue to survive after returning to the sea, the captain will slowly take it to peroxygenate, so that the fish can fully absorb oxygen in the water and then release it.
Sometimes, in order to save the fish, the captain will even jump into the sea himself and give the fish "artificial respiration".
"To go fishing in any country, you must abide by local laws, and there will be detailed rules on what fish you can catch in what season, what fish you can take and what fish you can't take."
Generally speaking, as long as it is a place where the law can fish, there is no saying that fish cannot be fished, and anglers cannot judge or control what fish is hooked or not hooked, but everyone will have a common legal awareness: as long as they do not know, let go.
This not only does not have to worry about breaking the law, but also protects the fingerlings.
Once the "booty" can be taken away at will, it is easy to form a purely commercial chain of interests, so that not only will the fish resources face the threat of indiscriminate plunder, but also the fishing will lose its original pleasure.
05 Exploratory fishing is really fun
"You never know what kind of fish it is until it's out of the water."
The joy of fishing lies in the excitement of being full of unknowns, challenges and fighting in the process, and a sense of satisfaction and achievement after catching. Moreover, there is no "most" in fishing, and its pursuit can be endless.
In November 2019, the 5-day trip in Tanzania was still deeply remembered by Chen Tao.
On the first day of explosive fishing, throwing rods out will hit tuna, small thirty or forty pounds, large sixty or seventy pounds, sometimes two in a rod and a bait. Everybody was hi.
The next day, however, nothing had changed in the same sea, in the same boat, but there were no fish, and the sea was as flat as a mirror. This is the last thing anglers want to see, because there is no water flow, no waves, indicating that the activity of the fish will be very poor, basically will not be hooked.
The situation in the next two days was roughly the same. The crowd waited from 8 o'clock in the morning to 19 o'clock in the afternoon, nearly eleven hours, more than forty degrees of heat, braving the scorching sun. There was no air conditioning on board, no electric fans, not even awnings. Every day, everyone sat on the 20 cm side of the ship on both sides of the boat, clutching the railing with their hands so as not to fall.
"Very painful, no fish yet. In those two days, I really had a dead heart, because I was the leader of the team, and I led everyone to Africa, the first day of explosive fishing, the second day, the third day of the army, the pressure was very great. ”
At 16:00 on the fourth day, the sun had not yet set, Chen Tao and his party decided to go to the place where they were fishing at night, although the sea was expected to catch only some small fish, which was quite boring, but at least it was not so hot.
Everyone changed their equipment to a light rod for catching small fish, chatting and waiting for the fish. Suddenly, the fishing alarm device sounded, and one of the team members pulled the line up. Originally the small fish should be easy to pull, but the device began to frantically out of the line, Chen Tao took a look, immediately judged that the small fish was robbed by the big fish, and now the hook must be the big fish!
"This fishing rod was not originally used to catch big fish, the only way to catch big fish with small equipment is to slowly grind with it, and if you pull violently, it is either a broken line or a broken rod."
Inexperienced team members, can not control the small rod, Chen Tao personally on the battlefield, after an hour and a half, the team members have speculated that the hook should be sharks, but at that time everyone's target fish species is actually a dog tooth golden gun.
As a result, after another hour, the fish finally came out of the water, which was the golden gun that everyone was looking forward to! It weighs 123 kg, compared to the world individual fishing record of 116 kg.
"Fishing is full of all sorts of disbelief. When everyone was depressed to the extreme, the world record-breaking fish was caught that night, and then the fifth day was a blast fish, and the whole trip was very happy. ”
A perfect fishing, not every throwing rod, that is very boring, the process has ups and downs, is the ideal journey.
"In my lifetime, when I can still run, I hope to go to more places, feel the wonders of different seas and study the fishing methods of various fish, which I think is also a kind of happiness."
06 The secret that makes middle-aged people head up
It is said that lying flat fishing is the ultimate dream of middle-aged men.
Although this is a passage circulating on the Internet, it also reflects the middle-aged people's attachment to sea fishing.
The reason for this may be evident from an early sea fishing experience shared by Chen Tao.
In 2004, he and his friends made an appointment to go fishing in Haiyang, Shandong. From Beijing self-driving, a total of 8 hours, from the beginning to the end, friends have been on the phone, the business is very busy, dealing with a variety of problems, two mobile phones have not stopped.
The next morning, the two went out to sea to an island called Senriyan, where there was no signal. After three days at sea, the harvest of fishing is not great, but it is rare to put down trifles and return to nature, and the experience is not bad.
3 hours after the return trip ashore, my friend realized that the phone was not turned on. At the moment of booting, Chen Tao saw a very amazing scene - about 8 minutes, the mobile phone prompt tone did not stop, nearly 300 unread text messages, missed calls.
"He might have had to deal with two or three hundred things in three days, but there was no signal, but you will find that the earth is still moving, and the company is still operating." Chen Tao said, "There are many ways to relieve stress, and maybe everyone needs to find the right one for themselves." ”
Chen Tao also had the stage of being "swallowed up" by work, he was the No. 7 employee personally recruited by Lei Jun, and he played the floor with Lei Jun, and experienced the blue wisps of the road in the early stage of entrepreneurship. After that, he soared in the Internet field and became the vice president of Damai.com, China's largest performance ticketing platform.
In the eyes of the outside world, this is undoubtedly the highlight of life, only Chen Tao himself knows how breathless the pressure of work and life is. It wasn't until he came into contact with sea fishing that he felt that his life was activated and restarted.
From 2003 began to play sea fishing, to 2013 to open the sea fishing service business, in 2019 to do sea fishing self-media, now the whole network fans more than nine million, leading nearly 10,000 people to go abroad, Chen Tao is considered to be the earliest pioneer in the field of domestic sea fishing sports.
He hopes to let more people know and feel the charm of this sport, experience fishing, get close to nature, and explore the world more fun.