The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  Grassi’s seminal capture was made off the coast of Sicily in the Strait of Messina, a turbulent spot where giant tides and severe up-swelling currents frequently dragged unusual deep-sea creatures towards the clutches of man. It might have seemed a leap of faith to then assume that the breeding place of European eels had been found along with the thin-heads, but Grassi had the weight of Italian pride bearing down on his shoulders, and as he watched his captive samples metamorphosize into elvers, the final juvenile stage of the eel before adulthood, he rushed to announce that he had dispelled ‘the great mystery which has hitherto surrounded the reproduction and development of the Common eel’, and claimed Anguilla anguilla for his country. That’s where the case could have been closed; then a young Dane rocked up and spoiled everything.

  Sadly for Grassi, and the people of Italy, it transpired that the young eels of Messina were actually fully grown thin-heads. He couldn’t possibly have known at the time – these were still the first correctly identified thin-heads after all – but the thin-head only metamorphosizes into the elver after up to three years of drifting eastwards on the Atlantic Gulf Stream. The results in Grassi’s aquarium had been such an instant success because he had collected his thin-heads right on their home straight: they were absolutely primed to begin their new lives in fresh water.

  In 1904 the Great Dane, Johannes Schmidt, a botanist by trade, was merely expanding his knowledge of land plants and researching the spawning grounds of cod, when a young-fish trawl happened to bring a 7.5cm thin-head to the net. The problem for Grassi was that Schmidt and his Danish research vessel weren’t in Messina; in fact, they were nowhere near. Schmidt was 2,000 miles away, trawling a net off the North Atlantic’s Faroe Islands.

  By 1922, Schmidt had declared in a Royal Society paper that ‘all the eels of Western Europe come from the Atlantic’, having successfully, and somewhat sensationally, narrowed his search down to a 700-mile-wide patch of sea located off the eastern coasts of Florida and Bermuda. Simply, Schmidt had gathered along a southern line that produced gradually smaller thin-heads until he captured the smallest thin-heads ever recorded, a positively larval five millimetres in length.

  Grassi was blown clean out of the water. Schmidt’s research vessel was hovering above the abyssal recesses of the Sargasso Sea when it snared its minute prize. Could there be a more fitting circle of ocean to untangle the enigmatic web that surrounded the origin story of the eel? Perhaps only the Bermuda Triangle can conjure up a greater sense of mystery; little wonder then that the borders of these twin obscurities overlap. Contrary to popular belief the Sargasso is not chock-full of the brand of tentacular monster that once dragged pioneering explorers and their boats to a grisly oblivion. Sargassum weed might occasionally exhibit itself on the surface in vast golden clods but the sea itself is relatively benign, fenced in on all sides by currents that swirl in perpetual motion around its great oval perimeter, as waves of long-distance runners might around an athletics track. It leaves the centre of the sea calm, quiet and, relative to the rest of the Atlantic, quite devoid of life. Quite why every eel from across Europe, North Africa and America chooses this spot to spawn is anyone’s guess, but that is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we are still waiting to discover about the eel.

  After the adult eels have mated, the baby eels hatch from fertilized eggs as the tiny, willow-leaf-shaped thin-head larvae of Schmidt and Grassi’s obsession. The second wave of the eel’s mass migration can then begin again, as the adults, finally relieved of their life’s burdens, pass away into a three-mile abyss, where their bodies are gratefully feasted on by the type of globular scavengers that lie in the endless black.

  I wish I’d known about all of this when I was a child. That each eel I held in my hand had virtually no peer in the whole world of freshwater fish. I would have shown them the deference and respect they deserved. I’m pretty sure I could even have grown to love them.

  We might not always have had a grip on the specifics of the eel’s life cycle, but humans have certainly tracked their movements for about as long as we’ve been hunter-gatherers. Eels have been harvested in their masses as far back as 6000 BC and eel traps and spears have been discovered on the banks of Northern Ireland’s Lough Neagh that date right back to the Stone Age. There was scarcely a watercourse in the UK where eels couldn’t be found in plentiful supply. From the River Thames to the Scottish lochs, the major drawcard of the eel was simply its pure unadulterated abundance.

  The eel was the fish of the everyman, as, unlike the carp, anyone could employ virtually any method to catch it and near guarantee protein for the table. Izaak Walton wrote in his 1653 magnum opus, The Compleat Angler, that in one Staffordshire pond he noticed: ‘such small eels abound so much, that many of the poorer sort of people that inhabit near to it, take such Eels out of this mere with sieves or sheets; and make a kind of eel-cake with them, and eat it like as bread’. They were so plentiful you didn’t even need to worry about salting their meat for another day: simply re-cast the lines or reload the traps and haul in all the eels you need afresh. In October 1257 Henry III celebrated St Edward’s Day with 15,000 eels, and in 1697 the north-eastern Italian fishery of Comacchio took three quarters of a million fish in a single night; earlier still, the annual tithe of eels paid under the terms of King Edgar’s charter of 970 saw just twenty fishermen hand over some 60,000 eels every year; a truly mind-boggling figure from a time before the deployment of industrial fishing techniques.

  The fact is, eels were available in serious numbers for a very long time, and there was real money to be made, especially from elvers. This immature adolescent eel is a thing of real beauty. Its translucence makes its dark eyes and black spinal column stand out against the rest of its body, almost as if it has been comically electrocuted as part of a child’s cartoon, but when a mass of elvers are held together in your hand their bodies blend collectively into piles of immaculate silver-white threads, as if pulled from a royal wedding dress. Given their appearance it is perhaps little surprise they were termed ‘white gold’, especially when elver prices can peak at as much as £500 per kilo on the French and Japanese markets. I once met an elver fisherman who used to illegally fish the estuary of the River Taff, ‘before they put the barrage over the river and ruined it’, who claimed he could make £5,000 in half an hour of work back in the 1970s. He was hardly an exception though: around the corner in the prolific Severn estuary it was apparently possible to make as much as £100,000 in a season; in fact the head of running elvers in the Severn was once so great they held an annual competition to eat a pint of elvers in the quickest time, and would regularly spread any surplus catch right across the fields to fertilize the soil.

  The value of the eel had something of a role to play in the life of my grandad too. He might have lived out his senior years in the Fens but he was a Bedford boy born and bred, and plundered the rivers around his home with great proficiency. He hadn’t been called up to the frontline during the Second World War owing to his skill as an engineer, but it can hardly be said that the threat of imminent invasion by the Nazis softened his ability to recognize a clear economic opportunity.

  Grandad wrote a self-published book detailing many of his exploits, but sadly there is only one copy of Bedford, My Bedford by Ken Millard in circulation. He hadn’t quite mastered the art of saving his work to the computer, so he’d just type out a page of memoirs and then print it straight away. This is a great shame as I think it is only myself, Dad and his second cousin Christine (whom he press-ganged into editing his material) who have actually been able to read his masterpiece, and thus the world will never know of the time he once watched the town brass band sink into the river during an ill-advised attempt at a floating bandstand, or the time his father forced the local school to promote him up the classes with the wonderfully illiterate and vaguely threatening: ‘just because this boy has a hole in his pants, he is still going to get an education’, or even how he narrowly avoided being court-ma
rtialled for what I can only gather from the chapter marked ‘Home Guard’ was a heady mixture of utter fecklessness, heavy drinking and a total disregard for any figure of authority. The end of that section climaxes in a particularly entertaining story that involves a pub, a dentist’s chair, a narrowly avoided night-long exercise in a ditch, and the revealing, yet clearly quite accurate, words: ‘we were very poor soldiers’.

  The chapter marked ‘Fishing’ recounts a story I had heard many times before. Wartime restrictions around the coasts meant fresh fish were extremely scarce, so when Grandad approached the local fishmonger to ask if he would like some eels, it came as no surprise that the answer came back: ‘As many as you can supply.’ Every Friday night thenceforth Grandad and his mates were to be seen creeping off around the local gardens in search of lobworms before fixing up to six rods behind the Clapham Club in the dark.

  ‘Many a night the six rods would be dipping in the river,’ he writes, ‘making a very hectic time difficult because the hooks had to be removed under a covering blanket and in a black-out as any flashing light would bring the local copper.’ Yes. My grandad was out fishing during the Blitz, a period of time when virtually every other person in Britain was hiding in the darkness within sprinting distance of the local air-raid shelter due to the very real fear of German planes bombing anything illuminated. ‘Our best haul was twenty-two fish,’ he proudly recounts, ‘which to us at one and ninepence a pound was very acceptable.’ Sadly his days of illicit eeling were to come to a premature end, not at the hands of the police, the Home Guard or, dare I say, the Nazis. No, much worse than that. ‘A number of the local ladies soon discovered that if they waited in Clapham Road they could stop us and buy our eels before we got to the fishmonger’s. It became so bad that the competition between these ladies meant that they would wait nearer and nearer to Clapham, so in the end we had to stop’, presumably before he started Bedford’s first eel riot. ‘Enterprise is very difficult,’ he laments, at the chapter’s close.

  Comfortably the largest of the freshwater eel species are the longfins found in Australia and New Zealand. Some specimens Down Under have been reliably recorded at almost five feet in length, and with other, less reliable accounts of eight-feet-long 100lb eels seen dragging cows into the depths, it is fair to say the crown for the world’s biggest eel is unlikely to ever leave the southern hemisphere. Meanwhile, here in the UK, the longstanding eel record stands at a comparatively small, but none the less very impressive, 11lb 2oz. It was caught by Steve Terry in 1978 from a lake in Hampshire, but there have long been rumours of unclaimed record breakers which have enough clout behind them to very reasonably suggest that Terry’s record is breakable.

  In 2013 an 11lb 8oz beast snared on sausage meat failed its verification checks for not having an independent witness; three years prior to that, a purported 13lb 1oz record fish also slipped through its angler’s hands for the same reason, but the most famous close call arose in 2005, when another 13lb monster was caught by a man known as ‘Norman the plumber’. His bait might have been intended for a big carp, but the rules and regulations of his fishery guaranteed a lifetime ban for anyone seen to be publicizing record breakers from any species. Despite a number of witnesses to the fish, and its immense weight, no photos were ever released to the public and the giant eel was not mentioned again.

  I was heartened to learn that my childhood home had turned up some of the most legendary eels in British history. The Fens are rightfully steeped in eel folklore, as, prior to the drainage work beginning in 1630, the entire landscape was flooded bar a couple of hillocks occupied by small hamlets, and eel fishing was a massive part of the economy. Indeed, so esteemed was the eel, our local city, Ely, took its name from them, and to this very day it holds an annual festival dedicated purely to the fish. The eel-hunting market was monopolized by a band of lawless hunter-gatherers known as the Fen Tigers, who ruthlessly opposed the drainage schemes and took to destroying the newly constructed sluices, justifiably concluding that they would devastate their eel-catching, reed-cutting and duck-hunting practices.

  I was fortunate enough to once meet the last of the Fen Tigers. Ernie James lived with his wife in a house right out on the Welney Washes, nestled in a remote spot between the prolific Delph and Old Bedford rivers. He trapped eels well into his nineties and built the most amazing willow eel traps with his hands, one of which he gave to my dad, who was his doctor right until the day he passed away at the princely age of ninety-nine. I was only a child when I met Ernie, and, sadly, I never had the chance to ask him about really big fenland eels. If I had I would’ve asked him if it really could’ve been possible that the River Ouse once produced a 36lb giant, or if Izaak Walton’s Peterborough eel of almost two yards in length was plausible, but, most of all, I’d want to ask him about an immense eel supposedly caught from a dyke not two miles from my house back in the nineteenth century. Witnessed by a man of the cloth and reputed to be some six feet in length, it seems from the realms of pure fantasy, but then what would a man of God stand to gain from lying about such things? Stranger things have happened in these parts, after all. Ernie and his friends once trapped a 34lb sturgeon in the Welmore Sluice, a critically endangered armour-plated fish that numbers fewer than 1,000 in Europe and which has long since been extinct in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, for the fish at least, it was taken to the markets of London and fetched such a good price that the men of the village all skipped out of work and went on the beers for a week. You’d now have a better chance of harvesting poo from a rocking horse than ever seeing a repeat capture of such a fish in the wild.

  Okay, so I might not be able to conclusively prove there were once record breakers in the Fens, but one thing I d0 know beyond doubt is that there were very big eels to be found here, as, against all the odds, the fenscape had already gifted me my own giant.

  I was nine years old when I had my first afternoon fishing with Grandad and Dad on the big river. Popham’s Eau flowed sluggishly down to the tidal Ouse and out towards the sea at King’s Lynn. It was the river where Grandad spent most of his time; it was close to his bungalow and contained large heads of bream and massive roach, if you knew how to catch them. I was keen to impress, but having been used to fishing the Creek, at no more than ten metres across and a few feet in depth, I was really struggling to cast my heavier, deeper tackle without help from Dad. Late in the day I managed one serviceable cast on my own and the float dipped with purpose.

  The fight tested my tackle to its absolute limit. I knew nothing of playing big fish, and this was far and away the biggest fish I’d ever hooked, so I simply wrenched as hard as I could and refused to give the fish any chance of running. The eel eventually erupted on the surface, projecting its long, muscular body out of the water like the arm of a giant octopus. We struggled to get it into the net as the eel was thicker than my wrist and as long as my arms, and when we tried to weigh it the fish thrashed so violently we were forced to take pity on it and quickly release it back to its domain.

  Grandad estimated it was around 5lb in weight, which made it my first bona-fide Wilson mega-specimen. I smelt my net afterwards; the eel slime resembled freshly sliced cucumbers. I didn’t wash it out for weeks, and carried the webbing as a badge of honour.

  As Wilson had prescribed, this eel had packed on the last of its weight and was on its great journey out to the sea. It didn’t have far to go at least: Popham’s Eau spewed out into the great estuarine mudflats of the Wash not fifteen miles from where we were sat. It’s a memory I haven’t considered in a very long time indeed. It was well over twenty years ago now and an absolute one-off, a shock that only fishing can produce, but as is customary with such moments in life they either stick with you for ever or they lose their momentum and fade into the background. I soon went back to deriding eels.

  I could consider heading back to the rivers of my youth in search of that eel – it is possible it’s still alive and it would’ve accrued a great weight in such a time – but
realistically there would not be a repeat capture of that fish; what’s left of him was probably digested and excreted somewhere in the Sargasso many, many years ago. Catching another big one was going to be a tough undertaking. I had been warned that serious eeling took a lifetime of study. This was a marginal branch of fishing where only the utterly committed found success. I joined the ‘Eel fishing’ Facebook group and found one expert advising an enthusiast not to give up on his potential water ‘till you’ve fished at least 10 nights without a fish, and even then don’t totally discount it’.

  I could’ve been in real trouble, but I had an ace hidden up my sleeve: I knew exactly where I was going to look for my big eel.

  I flicked back through my notebook, right back to when this all began at the start of last winter. There, scrawled in my shorthand, were the following words: ‘Leicester Line. Roadside service station. 8lb 2oz, 6lb 14oz’. I knew that would come in useful, I just knew it.

  I emailed John Ellis of the Canal & River Trust for more information and he graciously returned my message with specifics. It still wasn’t going to be easy: the Leicester Line Canal is some thirty-five miles long, and it spills into the Grand Union Canal and the River Soar at either end, but the numerous locks offered a real chance of eel entrapment at least, and the massive weights of those two fish suggested they may have gone sedentary in that patch for a number of years.

  The key to finding any record-breaking eel in the United Kingdom is the discovery of a landlocked fish. The sorts of water where either escape to the Sargasso is impossible or the supply of food is so undeniably consistent that the eel decides to hunker down for an extended stay. Most specimen-eel hunters head to large commercial lakes, where carp fishermen have piled in baits and unknowingly supplemented the growth of a giant; in fact, out of the fifty biggest eels of all time only two have come from canals. I wasn’t going to let that put me off though; after all, the larger of the captured eel pair was only 3lb off the British record. When it came to canals I strongly suspected it was the lack of anglers that had failed to deliver a record, and not the lack of potentially record-breaking fish.