Cape of Good Hope is a well-known name, closely related to geographical discoveries, Africa, the Cape colony... in general, each has its associations. For a long time it was associated with the name of Vasco da Gama, even from the geography lessons of 7th grade. However, life is full of surprises, and one day in the book of the remarkable mariner V.V. I read that in the Ryazan province there was a village of Gulynka, where the future vice-admiral V.M. was born. Headlin, commander of the boat "Diana", almost a year (1808-1809) stood near the African Cape of Good Hope surrounded by the English squadron and successfully ran away from them. And the village was later renamed Cape of Good Hope in memory of the desperate breakthrough of Hlavnin.
From the surprise used in the maps – it is true! In the valley of the Moxhi River near the town of Sassovo there is such a village. The desire to see it – the slate of the famous African Cape – was realized one spring at the beginning of the current millennium. My friend and I walked a long way around the village along the highway. Careful houses, stone cellars outside along the street... A geography teacher at the local school, which we looked in search of some landlord, said that the version of Konetsky is wrong, because the village of Gulynki is a completely different village, in a different area of the Ryazan region, and our Mys has nothing to do with it. He told us his version: in the spring, during the flooding, Moxha spilled so much that the portion of the terrace on which the village stands turned into a small temporary head. Immigrants from the neighboring village, who organized the original village here, in the hope of a new good life so called it - Cape of Good Hope.
This was my first surprise from the village – the logic of the villagers was entirely identical to the thoughts of the Portuguese King Juan II in the 15th century, who ordered to rename Cape Burr to Cape of Good Hope, hoping that the new name would not scare off seafarers and they would reach the desired India.
The second surprise was even stronger. Looking at our faces, digesting the first surprise, the teacher cleverly smiled and offered to go fishing. We said we were not preparing for her and we have nothing. The teacher assured us that nothing is necessary and that we will never forget this fishing. Fuck how he was right! After rushing home, he went out in a couple of minutes with some cloth, and we left near the village. Spring, the water level on the pit has just begun to decline, full of flowing lakes. Numerous grounds, laid along the pit, cross these canals, and the canals themselves pass under the roads in conventional concrete pipes of a fairly large diameter. The teacher turned out his clutch, which turned out to be a normal potato bag, approached the water pipes and simply put the bag under the flow of water from the pipe. It was not easy to hold it, the pressure was not weak. Periodically, he pulled out the bag and let water melt out of it. On the other hand, the man gets water in the bag! But 10-15 minutes later he approached us and showed us a quarter of a bag of fish – karashi and okuni! Thus e. The fish is caught with a bag from a pipe. I stumbled down – in the world that I knew until this moment, NO FISH was caught! This is not fishing, it is just gathering fish! The teacher our sight and said that this method didn’t work long, weeks two in the spring and sometimes in the summer and autumn during the floods. But for these two weeks, the locals usually provide themselves for the flight with whaled fish. Half an hour later, he put half a bag of fish in our backpack, thanked us for their interest in geography and left.
I had to travel a lot around the country, to see different ways of catching fish, but so simple and effective – never. And Cape of Good Hope has since been firmly associated with me not with Africa, but with one of our numerous Russian villages, each of which is surprisingly in its own way.