Let’s Catch Eel

After my first accidental catch of eel which was absolutely delicious, I set my heart out to catch more of these tasty, albeit scary looking morsels. They were actually out here where I was! My husband was not as enthused.

It looks like a… sea snake! It combines two things I’m scared of! The sea and snakes! Sea snake!

Yeah, delicious sea snakes.

It involved a lot of research–how exactly does one catch an eel, on purpose? How does one find a good place that has a lot of eels? Most sites simply stated that you put an eel trap (which is a converted minnow/spearing/killie pot) with some sort of bait (meat), toss it in at night and pull up in the morning and you should have yourself an eel or two. Some sites expounded on traditional methods of catching them, including stringing wool yarn with worms and having their rear facing fine teeth catch on them, using an eel spear in the winter, and, bewilderingly enough, throwing over whole animal carcasses over night.

They like structures, so are found close to docks, in salt, brackish, and freshwater. Other than that, the instructions were mostly vague, and seemed more about luck than anything else (which I suppose fishing is.) Also, I don’t know where you’d be able to leave the trap unless you own rights to a dock, so doing it overnight was not feasible. I had to piece together bits of information in order to figure out where to hunt for eels, especially since all I had was a fishing rod–but this rod had caught one before, which means it could do it again.

I suppose, in order to understand where I would find the most eel, we have to think about their life cycle. All species of eel have their own spawning grounds in different oceans, where they drop their eggs and their larval form drifts on ocean currents, they reach inlets and turn into glass eels that make their way into freshwater to grow, staying anywhere from 10 to 25 years until they reach a mature size, and then they make their way back to their spawning ground to start all over again. Since they can breathe air for a short amount of time, some will cross grassy areas to dump themselves into ponds.

In spring and summer, they are abundant as they begin to feed voraciously from their winter semi-hibernating state. In late summer and fall, the mature ones begin their migration.

This means that during October here on Long Island, decent sized eels are going to be in the rivers and streams moving back towards the open ocean.

Now for the bait aspect–they eat lots of things, and are usually predators, but they prefer an easy meal and so will forage as well. They are carnivorous, so often people catch them in their crab traps on their chicken. I went on a tip in a forum where the bloodier the meat, the better the bait, and so I took my fishing rod, bought a small pack of cubed steak (the cheapest I could find), cut it into small pieces, and hooked it onto a small snapper hook (size 6) with a weight (a key that goes nowhere because I lost my lead weight.) At sundown, I went to a local inlet (where there were public docks for people to board their own boats), and dropped the line in just a few feet from the dock and waited.

I started pulling up blue claw crabs and had resigned myself to getting a decent amount of crabs instead–then, was it my imagination or when I was pulling up a crab, I saw a black ribbon swimming near it? I quickly dropped the line back in. A few moments later the tip of my rod started wiggling like crazy. I didn’t touch it because eels will nibble first at the bait and push it around before they swallow it whole. If you start pulling while they’re nibbling, you’ll lose it. So I was patient. Suddenly, the rod bent hard and stilled and for a moment I thought I had lost it. Carefully, I gave it a little tug and the real bouncing of the pole began–there was an eel on my line and it was thrashing.

I abandoned trying to reel it in and began hand pulling the line. Up comes an eel, smaller than the one I had caught the first time around but no less feisty. Over the 10 inch limit so it was a keeper. It had swallowed the hook. I learned with the first one not to attempt to remove the hook and simply unsnapped the hook line from the leader and drop it in the bucket. Snapped on another hook, bait, and I was in business. I caught 2 in the hour and a half I was there and called it a night.

Word of caution, whatever you keep them in you’ll want it either deep enough so they can’t come out, or have it covered. Turns out eel escaping in the car isn’t a joke!

My mom, who had been very excited the first time I caught one, saw my Facebook picture post and asked that I save her one. I’m salting it to remove the mucous and I will freeze it so she has it when she gets back from Costa Rica in November.