The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  In truth, though, I knew my focus had shifted from the pursuit of rod-caught records. I just didn’t have that burning desire any more. Don’t get me wrong, it would still have been very nice, but I felt that I was finally in a place where the experience of fishing meant more to me than anything else and I didn’t want to spoil that by now tearing off to the nearest big-water commercial to fish for eels with a legion of carp anglers. The canal eels felt like a gift, an opportunity to fish somewhere unusual, where I knew the chance of encountering another angler was virtually zero; pure guerrilla fishing for a pair of fish who have almost certainly never been caught on rod or line. Either one would be a massive achievement, comfortably smashing my personal best right out of the water: really, what wasn’t there to get very excited about?

  I began to make plans. This was uncharted territory for me: to say I was a novice big-eel angler was a gross understatement – I didn’t have the first idea what I was doing and scoured internet forums, books and specialist websites for the best advice on tackle, location, bait and fish care. Wilson writes that ‘thundery weather finds them particularly active’, a fact borne out by almost every single expert on the subject. I needed a serious downpour, preferably a storm, right now, in the middle of summer.

  It felt weird hoping for rain, especially since I had been so comfortably outmanoeuvred by bad weather earlier in the year. We were experiencing the most extraordinary period of good weather as summer heaved on in its finery, a few days of sprinkling showers here and there, but nothing more than a blessing, and the whole nation was basking in a sort of collective euphoria.

  I felt a little guilty, but these big eels demanded a near biblical event: Old Testament rain of the sort that brings the pagans to the hills and leaves a disgustingly sticky night in its tail. Weeks dragged into months and I began to worry that it might not actually happen at all, then one day I woke up, checked the forecast and saw cloud icons blacker than Satan’s arsehole spreading right out across Britain.

  I should have been delighted but I had one very serious problem: the storm was due to hit the Leicester Line the day before my twin sister’s wedding. I spread out the map. It wasn’t all bad: the fishing spot was pretty much slap bang in the centre of the country, and as Anna was getting wed out east I could just about justify the diversion. However, this was no daytime sortie. There was absolutely no question but that the big eels were at their most voracious in darkness – why else would Grandad have risked arrest? But I absolutely had to be at the wedding venue the following afternoon for a family barbecue, which meant leaving bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first thing in the morning and not turning up looking like I’d been on a night-long eel-bender the day before the seminal event of my beloved sister’s life.

  There was another major consideration: the stench. If I caught a giant eel I knew I was going to end up looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even if by some miracle I didn’t, the bait I intended to use was firmly from the drawer marked ‘stinkiest imaginable’.

  Specimen-eel fisherman Matt Johnson in Eel Fishing for Beginners makes the case quite clear: ‘I will prebait for several weeks, on a regular basis, using a mixture of old fish, maggots, chopped worms and, if allowed, chicken offal,’ he notes, before coming to his senses and adding the following caveat: ‘Please check with your fishing club before baiting up with chicken intestines, as I do not want to be held responsible for your expulsion from the club for breaking the rules.’

  If I had been able to act alone I might just have got away with it, made up some excuse about getting a last-minute job in a sewerage system, and palmed it all off as an unavoidable inconvenience, with: ‘Hey, guys! I’m at the wedding now so just direct me to the showers and I’ll be down in a jiffy!’ However, for a couple of years now my life has been intractably intertwined with another. I didn’t quite know how I was going to tell my girlfriend, Emma, that we had to leave for Anna’s wedding a day early so I could fish for giant eels, but I knew how it was going to go down.

  I did some more virtual pre-baiting of my own and quickly discovered there was some sort of hotel located in the very set of roadside services I needed to be at to fish for the eel. Perfect. I could just imagine Emma having a bit of a pampering session there before the eve of the wedding as, Lord knows, she wasn’t going to be interested in the eeling. If I played my cards correctly I might even be able to convince her that this was actually a really great idea, a way of breaking up the long journey ahead of the weekend’s festivities.

  An internet search revealed a very reasonable early-bird price of just £46.75 for a room, but just as I was about to punch my credit card number into the booking form I foolishly read a couple of reviews on the establishment. One, on motorwayservices.com, gave the hotel a two-burger rating out of a possible five, worrying both for being a low score and for the fact that the place couldn’t even score well on a rating system inspired by fast food.

  I wish I could tell you I closed the computer down and saved my money. I wish I could tell you I picked a different, more reasonable fish from my list of options. I wish I could tell you I didn’t check that the lorry park was actually right next to the canal, so ideally located for the fishing, but the memory of Bedford, My Bedford by Ken Millard burnt brightly. I asked myself, quite honestly, what would Grandad do?

  And then I booked the hotel.

  All I can think about is eels and all I can see is eels.

  The storm hits on the drive over and the lightning streaks across the sky like livid white eels. Small sea-through eels streak in watery lines down my windscreen before the giant pair of rubber eels sweep them aside. I follow a thin white eel on my satnav and funnel my car along the thickest and greatest eel in the land: the M1.

  The services turned out to be the wrong side of the motorway, but I discovered a little flyover behind the hotel that led into the sort of seedy-looking darkened layby where you wouldn’t want to inadvertently flash your lights around. A squeeze under a fence line, a scramble through a furrow fit for a badger, and I’m shipped onto thick grass and the water’s side.

  My London perch water stretched all the way from King’s Cross to Birmingham on the Grand Union Canal, a distance of some 137 miles, but shortly after leaving Northampton a single arm separates from the main route and heads in a new direction up through Leicester. It was along here that I’d found myself, in the dusk, somewhere below the Watford Gap locks.

  Down by the canal all was calm. Nightfall was approaching fast and the tiny pipistrelle bats had taken to the Persian blue skies to hunt insects. They danced silently like blackened flakes of ash during a forest fire, their calm animation serving only to emphasize just how quiet the canal actually was. The water, frankly, was disturbingly still.

  It couldn’t be more different to the section of the Grand Union I experienced in London. There the banks were filled with people and commerce and the clear water revealed a sub-aquan dumping ground jostling for space among the city’s waste. It wasn’t pretty, but there was an elemental honesty to the place. Here, there was something of an unsettling air.

  Two rows of hazel and sycamore trees, and a heavily grassed towpath with blackthorn, elderberry and patches of giant hogweed, were all lovely enough, but the driving rush of the M1 in the background, the white lights from the cars and screeching brake pads, the constant pounding of air, like herds of wildebeest trapped in a ravine, stopped it from truly feeling like a breathing space.

  When you encounter green patches in densely populated areas there is something exciting about it, like you’ve discovered a small and unlikely victory for nature, a place where urban tension can be released, where the citified world can take stock and just ‘be’ for a little while. But when the scenario is reversed, when human waste collides with the countryside, it feels like an assault. Human hands built this canal, but the presence of water is usually good company for the wild, however it is formed. The M1, however, struck right through this place like a great grey spear.
r />   The whole place felt as if it was in a state of limbo, like this pair of opposing forces were simply getting through the uncomfortable pleasantries before each moved on with its life, two manmade cousins forced together for Christmas, one brash, right on and relevant, the other sloping towards retirement with stories to tell if the other would only listen. I’m sure if I had walked a mile up- or downstream I would have reached a point where the M1 curled a satisfactory distance from the water and the atmosphere would instantly have lifted, but then the monster eels wouldn’t be there, would they?

  Bricked on either bank and filled with a fudgy brown water that resembled something the greedy Augustus Gloop may have entered in the children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the canal possessed a regimented symmetry that made it quite hard to find features where my water serpent might actually feed. Eventually I identified two potential areas that differed from the rest. One was a step into the canal on the opposite bank, cut deliberately to about the size of half a tennis court. It was designed to allow boats to pass each other, but its position off the main flow, and the accompaniment of overhanging trees, made it prime real estate for an ambush, or, failing that, at least the sort of area where I could imagine insects or carrion would get held up for the eel to feast upon. The second spot was further along and on my bank. It was a small instep in the brickwork about thirty metres from the first lock gate for the Watford Gap, where a series of seven gates have lifted canal boats over the sixteen metres of elevation known as the ‘Leicester summit’ from as far back as 1814. I couldn’t fish any closer to the gates of the locks as, understandably, the Canal & River Trust didn’t want anglers getting themselves or their tackle in the way of the working machinery. Still, I could imagine an eel might patrol out from those giant wooden doors, moulding its body tight to the canal walls till it found that little deviation in the brick, and then hopefully landed upon my feed.

  The shade came on fast and the recce drew to its natural close. I cursed myself for not bringing a few bits of bait to drop into my spots to tempt some fish in early. A single white security light flickered into life above the locks. It cast an uneasy paleness over the place, like pallor mortis shortly after death; just perfect, I felt, for those that slither from their holes to gorge on the dead. I returned to the van as a plume of silver fish scattered across the canal’s surface like shards of broken glass from a mirror. The predators had arrived.

  The more I learnt of the eels’ plight the more I grew to respect their resilience. Given the sort of dark and nasty places they turn up in, it’s all too easy to transfer the characteristics of their bleak dwellings onto the animal itself. To do so is an injustice. When an eel appears in a storm drain, sewer or horse trough, it is a display of its extraordinary tenacity and iron will to survive and not necessarily an indication of preference. Never judge an animal purely by where it is forced to rest its head.

  ‘So, I erm.’

  I haven’t felt this guilty in a very long time. Probably not since I grassed my sister up to my parents for putting orange juice in my shoes when we were ten.

  The hotel where I’m going to have to leave Emma is too depressing for words. It’s the sort of place you would come to cheat on your partner, not turn up together for a romantic overnight stay. If anything, the reviews on TripAdvisor were generous. Quite what levels of depravity you would have to reach to get less than a two-burger rating doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Nicotine-coloured walls blend seamlessly with a floor that’s more stain than carpet. The whole place smells like the smoking area in a factory and it appears that the last guests had opted to have a massive fight with a full cafetière right before they left.

  Emma peels the net curtains back from the glass. ‘So this is my view for the night.’ We gaze silently at the petrol station forecourt out front. A large man fills his lorry with one hand and inhales a Ginsters Cornish pasty into his face with the other.

  ‘I feel, to be honest with you, like the biggest bastard in the world.’ I look earnestly into Emma’s eyes.

  If I’d thought this ham-fisted attempt at emotional revelation might elicit some sympathy then I was barking up the wrong tree entirely. ‘There’s probably a dead body in here,’ she says bluntly, flicking the blind shut and turning sharply, which is lucky as she doesn’t notice the enormous black blowfly wafting up from the window frame. I attempt a stiff grin and widen my body frame out to conceal the uninvited guest.

  ‘Come on, it isn’t so bad,’ I proffer, knowing it’s actually worse than bad.

  ‘Will. This is the sort of place in the films where women get murdered while they are left alone in a motel.’ She climbed onto the bed.

  ‘What, while their boyfriends are all off eel fishing?’ I retort, while dying a little inside. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’

  I consider, very seriously, just jacking the whole night in and heading off. But where could we possibly go now? The wedding doesn’t start till lunchtime tomorrow and we are hours from home.

  Liminality. ‘The quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.’ It feels quite fitting that I am attempting this feat from a service station, the symbol of being neither here nor there, where no one wants to be, but a stop you simply have to take if you want to make it to your destination eventually. In the services we are a metaphorical stream of eels, pausing to sniff the water, to feed, confirm the direction of our target and leave at the earliest available opportunity. I have extended our stay here purely for my own purposes; what, I wonder, does that say about me? I sensibly opt to keep my navel-gazing to myself.

  ‘Look, love, why don’t you just come out with me?’ I try, as a last resort, while knowing really how reluctant Emma is to fish at the best of times, and that a canal towpath at night could well be the final nail in the coffin of the chances of me ever luring her into my hobby. ‘It’ll be fun!’ I add, somewhat weakly.

  ‘No.’

  She thumps the remote and sends the television crackling into life. ‘I’m just going to sit here and do a facemask for tomorrow. See, I told you there were flies.’

  The giant fly settles above the head of the bed as I creep out of the door and accede to Emma’s demand to lock it securely behind me.

  I left school, went to university and entered the real world with little idea of how I was going to pay for the ticket on the door. I wanted to travel, so I worked as a barman and slept on a mattress before getting one of those month-long English language teaching qualifications that gives you access to the planet and a classroom of people who are sadly expecting an actual teacher. That introduced me to a small school in the Indonesian half of New Guinea and from that moment forward something of a spell was cast over me and my future. Nothing was ever really the same again.

  This wild, natural fortress had repelled outsiders like me for centuries, but in recent decades a gradual easing of borders had revealed some of the most fascinating tribal communities on earth. Spread out across the most bizarre set of geographical extremes that included the largest mountain range in Oceania, Asia’s most intact primary rainforest, and the largest swamplands south of Borneo, I discovered that these people had maintained pathways and networks of intertribal trade for almost the entirety of their 45,000-year history. These were the longest-running trade routes in human history and they were virtually unreported, but as the modern world pressed into New Guinea at pace they were in danger of fading into the background without record.

  I took it on myself to try and walk as many of these routes as I could, documenting the experiences of those local people who could still remember them, and then released my evidence onto the world, evidence, I felt, that elevated these people beyond the stereotype of them as backward, cannibalistic savages and firmly into the realms of what they deserved: recognition as a highly functioning, highly c
omplex, co-operative society.

  The world wasn’t really interested though. I spent the best part of the next decade of my life applying for small grants, researching, and going on ever more dangerous expeditions on the island. I had some successes, making the first record of the foot-only salt trade in the far west of the island and mapping almost the entire length of a 1,000-kilometre section of trade route stretching out to the southern coasts, and for many years that was just enough. I was living my dream and felt uniquely privileged to be following my own path in life. Sure, I had no money, and my work only interested the most fanatical of geographers, but I had enough to get by and, besides, I passionately believed in what I was doing. I supplemented my income away from the island by slowly going up the rungs in the world of documentary television, flitting from being a runner in London to working as a researcher in Cardiff, and generally felt quite happy with my lot, but as the years passed a creeping anxiety began to seep into my soul.

  In the beginning it felt a bit like the first time you get scared climbing trees as a child. You’ve done it hundreds and hundreds of times without a care in the world and then suddenly the fear grips you, usually when you are right at the top of some oaken giant with no obvious safe path back down. You realize you are mortal, that what you are doing is reckless, that if you fall you could seriously hurt yourself, or even die, but you are hopelessly addicted to the buzz and thrill of pushing forever forward so you don’t get down, you just sort of sit there, helplessly.