Anguilla Angst

Well the bream fishing is going according to plan - that is I haven't caught any. I have had two more nights in pursuit of the big bin lids but only managed to catch eels so far. I knew there were eels in this water and I've been told there are some very big ones with fish to over 7lbs but I did get quite a surprise when i fished with worms as bait. On the first night I had many indications, most of them line bites but I also got five good fast takes on the worms. Each one of these turned out to be an eel with the largest going 3lb 1oz, not too bad for starters.

I was worried though that all were deep hooked. I don't just mean well back, I mean deep, way out of sight. The bream rigs probably wouldn't have resulted in deep hooked bream but the eels obviously really wanted those worms. I didn't dare try to remove the hooks, size six super specialists, since I was sure I would have ended up killing the fish so I cut them off and crossed my fingers. I felt very guilty about this though as I expect most of them would still die due to having the hook embedded in their gut so I decided to do something about it.

Next night I rigged things up differently. Both the worm rods were to be fished bolt-style using fixed leads and on one I added the extra refinement of a "T" bar some two inches away from the hook. The idea behind this is that It's just not possible for the eel to swallow the hook down deep because the bar won't fit inside its mouth. Both of these rods were made up with barbless size eight Raptors this time so that if I did get an eel, I could unhook it easily.

The changes were partially successful. I only had one run during the night and landed an eel of 3lb 6oz. The barbless hook dropped out in the net so I was confident that this fish at least would survive. Trouble is, the other rod, the one with the "T" bar didn't produce any runs at all and when i reeled it in in the morning the worm was gone.

Looks like I need to work on this some more if I'm going to target those bigger eels. Then again, they are a sod to handle for the photograph!