The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  Found in a ‘pingo’, an ancient pool formed by the melting of subterranean swellings of ice at the end of the last Ice Age, the small colony appeared darker and browner than the classic livid greens sported by the pool frogs of France. That couldn’t be, though; the accepted wisdom read that our climate was far too cold for the pool frog to establish itself here naturally. Bone analysis of the Thetford frogs was conducted and, sensationally, it was discovered that these frogs had in fact been here since before the last Ice Age, making their own way from Europe before the close of everyone’s favourite freshwater species superhighway: the Doggerland land bridge, which delivered us the pike all those centuries ago. The pool frog was hastily reclassified and, almost overnight, we gained a second native frog species to call our own.

  For the crucian, though, until the ‘smoking gun’ of some conclusive DNA evidence can be unearthed, its plight in Britain remains precarious. ‘Why should we care?’ might seem a narrow-minded question, but a lot rests on the indigenous status of our wildlife. The classification of what is and what isn’t a native may seem ambiguous to say the least. As Richard Kerridge states in his superb book on reptiles and amphibians, Cold Blood, qualification only hinges on proving whether a species ‘established itself in a country independent of any human activity, no matter how long ago the arrival occurred’, but without it, it is virtually impossible to gain access to government funding and practical protective legislation for a species.

  For the pool frog it all came too late. In 1999, the year before the startling results of the bone analysis were published, the last of the Thetford population died in captivity; an avoidable tragedy caused by our somewhat over-zealous ranking of wildlife based on arbitrary status and public popularity.

  Whether we like to admit it or not, we inflate the importance of certain species over others all the time. The face has to fit. It has to penetrate the public consciousness and pull at the heartstrings for virtually anything to be done. Take the otter, for example. I love otters, and unlike most fishermen would dearly love to see one in the wild, but their celebrity status and cute looks have seen them garner a massively disproportionate amount of public sympathy and a hugely successful reintroduction, whereas other, less desirable, freshwater species have slid to virtual, or even actual, extinction with little or no protest whatsoever. The pool frog is one example, but what of the orache moth or the large copper butterfly? The slimy burbot fish? The Davall’s sedge plant? Or my water vole, with its yellow teeth and Wind in the Willows fame, whose numbers have plummeted by 90 per cent in the last twenty years?

  I could go on, but my point is that we quite clearly have much bigger environmental issues to worry about than simply whether a species is definitely native. As I write, one in ten of the UK’s wildlife species are threatened with extinction and the numbers of our most endangered animals have crashed by two thirds since 1970. I don’t mean to unduly anger those specialists who work tirelessly to curb the catastrophic damage caused by invasive species (see the grey squirrel, signal crayfish, American mink and oak processionary moth for further details), but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the presence of crucians affects our freshwater environment negatively in any way. According to Dr Sayer and Peter Rolfe, they cause no harm, and coexist with other species in just about the most high-quality environment you can imagine, so can we just get on with protecting them properly, please?

  We can be in no doubt today that our crucian populations are absolutely vital to the survival of the wider European crucian species. Over in Europe the aggressive-feeding and exceptionally well-travelled gibel carp, an interloper from Asia, has spread its seed into virtually every major watercourse on the Continent, even making it to the remote eastern reaches of the Baltic Sea. Of course, the gibel can cross-breed with the extraordinarily licentious crucian, and, with that, the purity of the entire continental species is now seriously under threat. However, we have no gibel here and, thanks to the unheralded (as well as unfunded) dedication of Marsh Farm, Peter Rolfe, Dr Sayer and all their friends, the British crucian has a fighting chance once more, and for that, I believe, we should all be very grateful.

  The years passed. I got the knack for carp fishing and fished almost exclusively in commercials until I left school at eighteen. Largely, I fished alone. I was pushing the envelope, fishing for hours and hours in conditions that a man in his late seventies just couldn’t take, but even when some of my friends showed an interest in joining me, I largely shunned them. I fully accepted I was obsessed, and that they would just hold me back from my ultimate ambition to catch bigger and, in my eyes, better carp. I would fish on through anything: terrible weather, hunger, tiredness, it just didn’t matter to me; there was almost nothing I wouldn’t put myself through to get in front of a fish.

  Dad had ultimately been right to persuade me to stick with school that afternoon in the pub. I made friends for life there and received grades that I just wouldn’t have managed anywhere else. Academically, I realized I needed to be sat on and chained to a desk to achieve, and my ability at sport had improved exponentially. I was extremely fortunate to be in a place where if you showed potential you had all the facilities you needed to improve, and, more than anything, to have loving parents who would do anything they could to nurture an interest in any of their children.

  Looking back, though, I just wish the by-product of all of it hadn’t been the development of a competitive, win-at-all-costs impudence that bordered on over-confidence. I realize now it wasn’t in fact the winning or the competition I had enjoyed at all, it was the feeling that I belonged somewhere, but in defining success purely through the rigid prism of personal triumph I had totally lost touch with any of the pleasures to be had just from being part of something. The same had become true of my fishing, and as I got older it was inevitable my interest began to wane. After I left school I never played a competitive game of cricket or rugby again.

  Perhaps, in its own way that is what crucian fishing is all about. The fish is small and challenging in its own way, but it is the subtle pleasures to be found in the sort of environments it inhabits that bring such a unique joy to this style of fishing. I am indebted to the fish for my having found the traditional British pond before it fully faded from my consciousness. It feels like the blinkers have been lifted from my eyes, but with so many fish records to chase I’m not entirely sure what to do with the rest of my year. Am I really saying that the thought of continuing for something really big is now a pointless endeavour? Of course I’m not, but the spirit of crucian fishing can only influence me to look for more than just a big fish as I continue this quest. Like my grandad before me, I’m a fisherman for life now, and have learnt those who pursue size, and size alone, can never expect their interest in this pastime to see them all the way to the grave.

  Early June came and went with no record-shaking fish. Then, utterly against the grain, the biggest crucian of the year was landed from a secret pond hidden away somewhere in leafy Shropshire in the middle of August. It weighed almost 4lb and was accompanied by another brace of fish of over 3lb. Ed Matthews, a hooded chap with a broad smile, had hand-stocked and reared the fish just seven years earlier. ‘I was overwhelmed,’ he gushed in the pages of the Angling Times, ‘I stocked these crucians when they were around one inch long and cared for them for so many years, just hoping one day that they’d weigh over 3lbs … now it’s got me wondering just how big they could go.’ Perhaps the hidden season is no longer the time to target the record shakers, or perhaps it is just that the hidden season means much more. I’ll leave it to you to find out.

  The Fish Everyone Hates

  It is easy to see, in the mind’s eye, a salmon resting behind a rock, a trout sipping down an insect between two trails of green weed, a chub or barbel swaying in the current where the willow branches dip. With the eel, the best I could do was say to myself, ‘I know you’re down there somewhere.’

  Tom Fort, The Book of Eels (2002)

  The worl
d lacks love for eels.

  The bed of the Creek was absolutely paved with them. It didn’t seem to matter if you tried a big bunch of lobworms or the tiniest of maggots from the tub, if you rested any bait on the deck for any stretch of time it wouldn’t be long before the float started to give you the telltale tap-tap-tap of an eel making its enquiries.

  Such a subtle touch for such a grotesquely powerful fish, but the twisting, pounding fight was not an event to be celebrated; in fact, hooking an eel was categorically, unequivocally and absolutely – a disaster.

  If you managed to get it out of the water before it severed your nylon with its teeth it would reward your effort by quickly coiling itself up in a ball against your line, creating a tangle of Rubik’s cube difficulty and thoroughly coating you, your tackle, your net and anything else in your proximity in a thick layer of ectoplasmic snot that would linger for days. To actually unhook and release the eel, which has long since taken your bait, hook and half a foot of your line into the depths of its tubular intestinal tract, took such an extreme level of luck and skill it was nearly always better for everyone to just snap the line and hope the hook worked its way out of the fish by itself. A thoroughly upsetting and dispiriting event that left us fishing almost exclusively in the upper layers of the river as children on the Creek.

  The eel, like the perch, had a funny habit of following me around throughout my childhood. I continued to catch them in the Creek in spite of my best efforts, and even managed to catch a freshwater eel while out sea fishing off a set of rocks in West Wales. It was my first-ever fish from the sea but it was not a sea fish. I was furious, and quite ignorant of just how unusual a catch that was.

  The eels were all the same size: never longer than a bootlace or in excess of 1lb in weight. Small, rapacious creatures that my friends and I didn’t really even count as fish. Then, one sultry summer afternoon in the heart of the school holidays, my fishing friend Paul Woods screamed his BMX into my backyard and announced there were eels the ‘size of snakes’ in his neighbour’s back garden, and that they were ‘feeding on cat food’.

  Paul had a wonderful gift for telling tall tales and attracting trouble. There was the 20lb carp he caught at Wood Lakes when none of us were around, the rope bungee jump in his back garden that nearly killed us all, and then his extraordinary pyrotechnic skills that saw a home-made rocket simultaneously blast all the glass clean out of a neighbouring greenhouse and kill every single fish in their koi carp pond. I didn’t know whether to expect nothing or everything, but I jumped on my bike all the same, picking up the third of our angling triumvirate, Lee Wales, from his house on the way back over to Paul’s.

  We threw a handful of cat food into the Creek and watched. ‘That’s it, young man,’ croaked Paul’s elderly neighbour, ‘they’ll all come out now.’ Lee made a highly exaggerated and very sarcastic eye roll and I had to pinch the inside of my arm to stop myself from laughing out loud, but just minutes later all three of us were stood in stupefied silence.

  They were everywhere. I looked at Paul. Paul looked at Lee. Lee looked at me. Like those twenty-foot-long handkerchiefs produced from a magician’s sleeve, the eels had kept going and going until the mud was simply alive with writhing bodies. It was the snakepit in Raiders of the Lost Ark, plenty enough to turn the stomach of lesser mortals, but we were the fishing gods and these creatures were desecrating our temple. We sprinted for the rods, fixed the biggest hook we owned on the strongest line we had, and deployed a single piece of cat food deep into the centre of the twisted masses.

  A darkly marked python bee-lined for my bait, angled its neck, and swallowed. As I struck, the shoal scattered to the darkness and my serpent hauled back hard on the hook. Any thoughts of a prolonged fight were banished: I was using my sea rod with a line like steel-wire and my reel drag was bolted down so tightly it would take a spanner to loosen. In short, this fish was coming out by hook or by crook.

  The beast landed on the grass and we leapt on it with all three pairs of our hands. We were never going to keep this eel, but since we had now caught and subdued it, it seemed somehow wasteful to just put it back straight away. It was magnificent. Thick and black as the ace of spades, it probably only weighed 2lb but it was double the size of any eel we had ever seen before. We needed to at least try to do something different to celebrate the catch.

  For some inexplicable reason I decided to place my thumb in the eel’s mouth.

  I remember being momentarily surprised to learn the eel’s teeth felt a bit like sandpaper before a brand of pure, crushing pain consumed my digit. It pulsated from my thumb, travelled up my arm, and exploded out of the roof of my skull with a scream.

  Lee and Paul jumped back in fright and the eel, realizing it was partially free, went into something of a crocodilian death roll, comfortably twisting my arm around in its socket and leaving me with the very real fear that it would soon tear my thumb clean off. As its tail met water it showed mercy to me, released its teeth and back-paddled into the murk to tell all its friends about the idiot boy it had just encountered.

  Eels are the absolute opposite of the carp, in physicality, feeding habits, popularity, everything, and now I hated them more than ever, but then, one day, I baited the bottom of the river and didn’t catch one. I tried the next day and failed again. I spoke to my friends; no one had caught one in weeks. It was utterly bizarre, but the eels of the Fens seemingly disappeared overnight.

  There’s something about the shape of the snake that makes us stand up and take notice. We are actually hard-wired to pay greater attention to the snake than the frame of any other animal. Surprisingly, the fear of snakes is not actually innate. According to findings published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology we are only born with the ability to quickly detect, and immediately respond to, the serpentine form, but the phobia itself is a culturally conditioned response. The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course: the fact that we are so reactive to snakes makes the adoption of a negative emotional response so much easier, regardless of whether the animal in question is actually dangerous or not. Bad news for the eel then.

  The eel does itself no further favours in the public-relations department by conjoining its superficial likeness to the snake with what Wilson describes as a ‘slippery body … covered in a heavy coating of protective mucus … and strong jaws lined with microscopic whisker-like teeth’.

  It is unfortunate that the eel’s appearance has brought it such loathing. If you can look beyond its aesthetics there is truly a wondrous fish in waiting. The eel can live comfortably for over eighty years, with some reports of fish passing over a hundred; they can also increase or decrease the size of their eyes, jaw and head, and change colour, to suit their surroundings; and, when required, the eel can even survive out of water by absorbing all the oxygen it requires through its skin. The dorsal and anal fins are fused seamlessly with the caudal fin, framing the eel’s entire body in one continuous paddle, which allows the eel to swim backwards just as strongly as it can forwards; plus they are born as hermaphrodites with the ability to adjust their sexual organs to suit the demands of their locale. Impressive stuff in itself, but none of this can come even close to matching the greatest feat of the eel.

  Most eel species live entirely at sea – giant congers with breezeblock heads, and colourful and sharp-toothed morays that slither across tropical reefs – but there are also sixteen freshwater species to be discovered right across Europe, southern and eastern Africa, North America, parts of Asia, and the South Pacific. Every year, hundreds of thousands of these freshwater eels undertake an extraordinarily perilous quest to reach their breeding grounds, with the most obscure, and certainly the most remote, reserved for our own eel species: Anguilla anguilla, the European eel. If the following tale of endurance doesn’t make your eyes glisten and chest swell with new respect for the eel, then truly: you have no heart.

  When the time is right, nothing can get between the adult European eel and its desire to reproduce
. Wilson notes, in a rare moment of encyclopedic ebullience, that the eel’s snout ‘becomes more pointed, the eyes glass over, and the body’s fat content increases in readiness for the monumental journey ahead … Even eels living in tiny ponds or pits miles from the nearest river system find running water and travel downstream.’ Their determination to breed is the stuff of legend. Fishing author Fred Buller writes of a night in Cumbria when he witnessed ‘a stream of eels’ that ‘were not halted by my walking among them’. I too remember once encountering an eel in the middle of a cricket pitch just after rainfall, head down and thrusting forward to flowing water some half a mile away. I wanted to pop him in my worm bucket and take him there myself, but this fish needed no help, and was soon gone, at a far greater pace than your average outfielding farmer might make in pursuit of a cricket ball.

  It quickly became clear, to those who cared to look, that the freshwater eels were all heading out to sea. Even the philosopher Aristotle was moved to record in the fourth century BC how the eel would suddenly become hell-bent on making it to salt water, but for centuries no one had a clue where they went once they were there, or, indeed, why.

  Tom Fort superbly breaks down the origins of the eel in what is surely the seminal eel text of our time: The Book of Eels. He highlights how it was actually not until the seventeenth century that an Italian naturalist, Francesco Redi, correctly hypothesized that the eggs of the eel were laid at sea; before that, the best guess was that eels were formed from mud, but Francesco was a long time dead before any evidence was unearthed to support his theory. In 1897, another Italian, the celebrated biologist Giovanni Grassi, was the first ever to net a sperm-carrying eel and then went one better by capturing and identifying the youngest eels ever recorded: gentle, transparent fish only a few centimetres long, known henceforth as ‘thin-heads’.