One misty sunrise I was lifting eel fyke nets on a lake in Warwickshire. I rested my oars to watch a young peregrine teaching itself how to catch black-headed gulls. Being out in a boat, or maybe working on a timber roof, tends to raise my spirit above the more usual pedestrian level when you don’t bother to realise how good it is to be alive. But remembering the pleasure of being on a lake as the sun burned off the mist does not erase the discomfort I feel now at having been a fisherman. Memories like these remain but my conscience is uneasy; although I tell myself that my fishing was as sustainable as I could make it, and that the cause of the eel decline lay elsewhere, the guilt remains alongside extraordinary memories. I live with the discomfort of this cognitive dissonance, though I also tell myself that much has changed since I worked as a commercial eel man, and that I know things now that I didn’t know then. Nevertheless I hope you may feel that there is a particular authenticity in the views of someone who has fished eels, and salmon, and herring, and langoustines, and thought it joyful to make a living from it and to be out on the water in boats, and using nets to draw up the creatures living mysteriously out of sight below the surface, and maybe living in a relation to nature that man has enjoyed for thousands of years, and might have enjoyed in moderation for many more. I happened to find myself enmeshed in it and delighted by it just at the time when it was about to become obvious to any rational person that it was time for it to stop.
I fished green or yellow eels and trapped silver eels on their migration back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, and I had less to do with elvers, except that I bought them sometimes to restock waters where I had fished. In the UK in those days fishing for elvers, the tiny ‘glass eels’ migrating from their hatching grounds way across the Atlantic in the Sargasso Sea into the estuaries of great rivers systems like the Severn, was completely unrestricted. The National Rivers Authority were not motivated to control it in any way, though eel men like me had to be licensed and were issued with tags to tie on all their ‘fishing instruments’. The elver men with their lave nets were thought to be mainly fishing for beer money, and they weren’t men the inland revenue would want to confront in the dark on the river bank either. It was traditional, though the days of taking elvers home for a fry-up with a bit of bacon were long gone. A polystyrene tray with half a kilo of these ‘glass eels’ might be worth a couple of hundred pounds, maybe more. So there was money to be made, and most of it was made either by the elver merchants or by fish farmers in Europe and the Far East. That is where the elvers went – there were no eel farms in the UK.
Because of a catastrophic decline in eel stocks, the EU introduced regulations to control fishing both for elvers and for adult eels, with stipulations to encourage restocking of suitable waters and the provision of eel passes to facilitate their migrations both up and down our rivers. The most important change is that the sale of live elvers to the Far East is now illegal.
Elvers running up our rivers, like frogs laying frogspawn in our ponds, are bringing a rich food source into our watercourses in the springtime, just when young birds and young fish are feeding. They are, or were, an important feedstock of our water systems, a food for a wide range of species, and they should have been valued as such, though I’ve never heard anyone else advance this argument. Even now the emphasis seems to be on simply reversing the decline, rather than seeing eels as a keystone. Government agencies have tended to view fish as natural food resources that can be ‘harvested in a sustainable way’. This view sees fish from an entirely human point of view, where ‘sustainable’ means that fish can continue to be harvested for food without declining to a point where it becomes uneconomic, which I suppose means without complete collapse of the fishery.
Population dynamics of wild animals are complex and sometimes seemingly contradictory. A famous campaign against wood pigeons on East Anglian farms in the 1950s, in which thousands of pigeons were shot, resulted in an increase in pigeon numbers. This was eventually discovered to have been because the birds shot each winter were mainly the older and weaker low-flying birds. This resulted in a smaller and healthier population feeding on the cabbage fields at the time of year when pigeon food was scarcest, and as a result these pigeons were fit and fat enough to raise an extra brood each summer. So it is not axiomatic that shooting or fishing leads to population decline, but however those debates were continued they were not actually relevant to the elver fishery, because it was no longer a food source, and not therefore something to be regulated as one might regulate the herring fishery. There was little justification for a trade in a vital ecosystem resource that bought a bit of beer, enriched the two main elver merchants in the Gloucester area, and at least one in Somerset, and brought quite a lot of wealth to fish farmers overseas who were, frankly, no concern of ours. But somehow, as George Monbiot pointed out recently in an article in the Guardian, we are more likely to see fish as an exploitable resource than as wildlife.
I got to know one of these elver merchants. He also dealt in the salmon from the putcher weirs that used to line the Severn estuary. I think he knew that sending vast quantities of elvers by air to the Far East was pretty questionable. When I asked him how much he would charge me if I wanted to restock waters where I had been fishing adult eels, he said that quite often he had small quantities of elvers for which it was not worth arranging air freight and he would let me have them cheaply. I think his conscience felt better for his coming to this arrangement, and he would call me now and then to offer a few trays of elvers, maybe 3000 in a tray, at a reduced price. Several hundred pounds maybe, but still, reduced, and conscience stilled.
Elvers or glass eels are not much bigger than a needle, and so transparent that you can see their hearts and spinal cords. When their annual migration brings them to our coasts they swim up estuaries at night at that state of the outflow of the tide when the river water is running down the centre and there is a helpful backwash up the sides, which is how the elver men standing on their ‘tumps’ on the river bank were able to catch them in their lave nets. Elvers are agile and driven, motivated to work their way up waterways and up mossy dams and sluices. The ones I bought got a free ride to lakes and reservoirs that I had fished, and I was able to tell myself that what I was doing was sustainable.
Like other eel men I either sold my catch to a merchant from the Levels, or to a Dutchman who came over from the Netherlands with his vivier truck. He also dealt in eels from the East somewhere, a subspecies that differs somewhat from the Atlantic eel. I suspect it was his sluicing of his tankers somewhere in East Anglia that introduced a swim bladder parasite of that Asian species that spread through our waterways, and I suspect too that Atlantic eels, not having evolved to coexist with the parasite, suffered badly.
To reproduce, eels have to swim back to the Sargasso Sea, and to do that they need their swim bladders more than when feeding in a muddy river. I’ve never heard of any research that concludes that the cause of the current eel decline is that the parasite hampers their thousand mile ocean journey to the breeding grounds. But that may be because hearing accounts of the decline of species (that in my time have flourished and abounded and been part of my life) is so painful that I switch off the radio when I hear talk of the eel decline. Developing ecological awareness, as Aldo Leopold said, can have the result that ‘one lives alone in a world of wounds’. It was easier to be a fisherman proud of my skill with boats and fyke nets and netting needles, living a life that I thought was in harmony with the movements of the fish, that brought my life within the cyclical patterns of nature, aware of the moons and the darknesses and the pressure systems in the Atlantic that affect the movements of eels. I thought, as did the National Rivers Authority, that fishing could be ‘sustainable’. Now I see the narrowness of that idea. Sustainable just meant that if fishing continued at a ‘sustainable’ level, whatever that was, we could continue to catch and sell and eat. It was sustainable in the sense that it was thought to provide a predictable food resource if not over exploited.
This approach did not take into account that the elver migration was a recycling of nutrients bringing fertility to our river systems. Elvers swimming up the rivers every year, and other migratory fish like salmon and shad, are bringing back nutrients that have been washed into the oceans, enriching the rivers and lakes at the time of year when the fish and birds that breed in our rivers need to feed their young. Overexploiting the elver run was depriving our freshwater ecosystems of a rich flux of vital nutrients as well as reducing a species with an important function in freshwater ecology.
At that time there were still many traditional salmon fisheries on the Severn. There were drift net fishermen working up and down with the tides from Newport, and putcher ranks all along the tidal Severn shore. Lave net fishermen risked their lives wading in the dangerous tides, and there were stop-net fisheries here and there with their huge counterbalanced triangular nets on heavy wooden boats straining against the strong incoming tides. All these have gone, mainly because they could not lobby for their survival as strongly as the landowners who owned salmon fishing rivers could lobby against them. But posh people don’t fish eels, so the elver fishery survived, and became a central part of the EU eel legislation because elvers are ideal for restocking projects.
So it would be pleasing to believe that the traditional elver fishery has survived not only to provide those Gloucester and Somerset blokes with some beer money, but also so that the elvers can be used to restock our lakes and rivers and halt the eel decline. Unfortunately the eel decline does not seem to have been halted. This is probably because of the demand for elvers to be raised in eel farms in the Far East to provide a popular ingredient in sushi. The smuggling of elvers from Europe to the Far East is the greatest wildlife crime on the planet, in terms of weight (100 tonnes pa), of the estimated number of individual animals smuggled (350 million elvers pa) and also by value (4 billion euros). And in this respect Europe definitely includes the UK. If you doubt me, check out the links below. It makes my unease at having fished eels seem rather insignificant.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/07/man-guilty-smuggling-millions-pounds-worth-live-eels-uk-hong-kong
Once again, great reading and so much of interest that I knew nothing about.
It brought back a memory from the 60s when I was a young deck “cowboy” in the Merchant Navy. I sailed on many different ships, and the most boring but good for overtime was the Europic Ferry that ran back and forward between Felixstowe and Rotterdam mostly carrying lorries. One regular that had to be carried on the open upper deck was from Ireland with six or eight frothing galvanised tanks and a petrol driven pump on the back. I remember speaking to the driver/owner, it was a long time ago and my lifestyle back then may have blurred my memory somewhat, but I’m sure he said he picked up live eels from Ireland and took them to Europe (Greece?), sold them, and then picked up a different variety of eels and brought them back to London where they were considered more of a delicacy.
Holland used to be the centre of the European trade, probably still is. I think all the eels of Europe are the same species, but there are other species in New Zealand, I think, and Asia. I must investigate some day, and find out where they go to breed. And now I know why you call yourself 'Deckboy'!.