In the Lipetsk region, on the territory of the Gryazinsky district, on the Matyr River, there is a large reservoir, popularly called the Lipetsk Sea. It really has impressive dimensions: the length reaches 40 kilometers, the width is one and a half, and the depth reaches 13 meters.
In the eighties of the 20th century, the reservoir was used for commercial fishing, but now the ecological situation there is far from ideal. In summer, the "sea" blooms, and because of the lack of oxygen, fish begin to die en masse in it. And suddenly, several years ago, in the vicinity of the reservoir, they started talking that a local monster, like the Scottish Nesen, had appeared in it.
The atrocities of the monster
Lipetsk ichthyosaurus (or plesiosaur) behaved ugly. One summer night, a ninth grader Sasha Pospelov went swimming with his friends. He swam farther away, and suddenly the water seethed next to him, and something pushed hard in his leg. The schoolboy swam to the shore as quickly as possible, and when he got out, he saw that blood was oozing from his leg. As a memento of this adventure, Sasha had a big abrasion on his thigh: the skin was scraped like emery.
An inveterate fisherman Semyon Lvov had a chance to see an unknown monster. One morning he went fishing, but there was no bite, as if something scared the fish.
Lvov had heard about the water monster, but somehow he did not believe in these tales. So he was sitting, patiently looking at the float, when he suddenly noticed a long shadow in the water about fifteen meters from the shore.
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Then something like a hump appeared on the surface. Semyon froze, and the creature dived a couple of minutes later. Hefty such, judging by the splash, and like a fish tail flashed. Lvov considered the monster to look like a catfish, only the dimensions were clearly excessive - ten meters, as it seemed to him, no less!
In short, many have seen the ichthyosaurus. And he clearly considered the reservoir to be his property. He ate fish, stole geese and other waterfowl. Several times on the shores of the Lipetsk Sea, dogs walking along the shore mysteriously disappeared, and in front of fifty-year-old Evgenia Mulemina, a monster stole her own piglet Yashka.
- Yashka was neat, he loved to swim, - she shared her impressions with journalists. - Will go into the water up to its belly and stand, basking. At that time it was already getting dark, I went to drive him. Suddenly "it" will jump out of the water! Yashka only had time to scream - there was a pig, and no! And the circles diverge on the water …
A giant catfish?
They tried to watch the monster with nets, and with guns, and with cameras. But all is in vain. The only high-quality picture was taken by Anatoly Golovko, a resident of St. Petersburg, who was resting in those parts in autumn. He photographed local landscapes, and besides that, he managed to press the shutter of the apparatus in time, when for a second, as it seemed to him, a "little whale" jumped out of the water.
After examining the picture, ichthyologists came to the conclusion that the strange creature most of all still looks like a catfish, but the size! The length of the monster was estimated at seven meters, while the largest catfish ever described reached "only" five.
Since ancient times, catfish really loved pools and all kinds of dams with calm water. Where they are sometimes caught. For example, in 2007 in the waters of the huge Kapchagai reservoir in the Almaty region (Kazakhstan), a catfish was caught 274 centimeters long and weighing 130 kilograms. But the seven-meter length makes the Lipetsk monster unique even in a similar row.
However, that there is a giant catfish or pood carp, which in the lower reaches of the Matyra seines are caught by workers of fishing cooperatives, when in the summer of 2012 a resident of the town of Gryaz Nikolay Burtsev caught a kilo piranha in the waters of this river, which he then kept in the refrigerator for a long time, surprising his friends and not only.
Valdis Peipins