Use a sheep to snare an eel

Soldier Palmer recalls a childhood spent trying to catch eels using poachers’ tricks

- Palmer

A powerful, winding estuary runs through the marshes below my house. It was a thrilling place to play when I was a child, and the deep, salty channel made for a handy escape route in my teenage years. The ebb tide draws everything downstream past the pub in the harbour, so my brother and I would often paddle our little boat down for an evening pint.

Salmon and sea-trout ride up this estuary to spawn in the hill streams and I used to try for them with a spinner when the rain came. I never had any luck in the brackish, murky water but I did once catch an eel on a hook baited with worms. It was purely an accident but the sight of an eel squirming and tying himself in knots at the end of my line set me thinking: if the estuary would not give me salmon, then I would learn how to catch eels.

In truth, eels were easily caught in those days. I soon found out how to catch them in good numbers, simply by weighting a hook and baiting it with anything from worms and rabbit meat to the guts and brains of other eels. I developed a system where I could run several lines at once, attaching them to plastic electric fence poles, which twitched and wobbled to indicate a ‘bite’. There was one afternoon when I managed to catch 30 eels like this, running back and forth between the poles in a frenzy. So much for fishing as a sport of meditation and relaxation; I was sweating and frantic to keep up with my haul.