Eels are too precious to be used only once.
Although my grammar school nuns would not agree, I consider running out of bait a mortal sin. When that bait is eels, it is even more egregious.
An eel is a precious commodity, and I never toss them away until I absolutely have to, and never where I happen to be fishing. I’d warned this particular deckmate not to toss dead or bluefish-truncated eels overboard. We were here to catch stripers, not feed them, but he had developed this bad habit which began to wear thin on me.
I almost always provide the eels because I use larger eels than you might find in your average bait shop, but this guy had a friend who potted meat eels and could usually get some really big snakes.
Size Matters
At that time, I was storing eels in Padanaram, Westport and Sakonnet Harbors as well as bringing at least a dozen prime snakes with me just in case some lowlife discovered my stash. I prefer big lively eels. They hit the water with a loud splash and almost always head for the bottom. The whips some people prefer twist their tails into a knot around your leader and cause you to lose precious time re-rigging rather than fishing. If you have nothing but whips grab them by the head with a piece of rough towel or burlap and crack their tails over a hard surface like the edge of a cutting board, or the hard surface of a gunwale cap. This separates the last few sections of the tail and prevents them from wrapping themselves into a slimy knot.
Tim Coleman had a penchant for smaller live eels and consequently spent a great deal of time untangling their messes. He liked the ‘one swallow’ routine whips offered him and paid a price in time lost actually fishing. It is difficult, if not impossible to beat live eels as a striper bait. You can buy them in most bait shops and through judicious handling keep live eels for weeks, even months. As noted, I kept live eels in various harbors in live cars attached to mooring lines, however you can keep them alive in a large, aerated cooler or as I did in a live crate attached to my float on our back river.
Elver Wars
Back then I was potting live eels in the Coles, Lees and Taunton Rivers and kept a few topnotch Cuttyhunk captains supplied with eels which they reserved for special clients who were adept at casting and fishing live baits. I was never concerned about the supply of live eels until the Japanese marine growers began paying ridiculously high prices for immature eels (elvers) with prices into the thousands of dollars for a gallon of live elvers. As a child the same evasive eels I tried to catch under the rocks on low tides became so valuable that a team of poachers, driving a converted stainless steel milk truck from up north, showed up in Swansea where I had been appointed the Herring Warden.
A fisherman of my acquaintance, looking to net a few herring accidently walked into their fine mesh seine set across the upper herring run and gave me a call in the wee hours of the morning. I responded with a Swansea police officer and soon after, an environmental police officer who waited in hiding for the men to return and haul their net in a pickup truck while the aerated tank truck was stashed a few hundred yards away in the big box store parking lot.
Snake Charmer
After prodding from readers, I decided to write a book I titled, Snake Charmer, which would cover the acquisition, holding and fishing of live eels. As I began putting the book together some associates began to hear rumors about the eels being considered a threatened and perhaps even an endangered species. I put my photos, notes and files together in a folder under Snake Charmer because who would want a book on a species and a practice which might not be permitted? I no longer pot eels but have a few good sources which stock and sell what our former Long Island editor and current Senior Editor Emeritus, the late Fred Golofaro, referred to as “bass candy”. Freddy was also a dedicated practitioner of the term, “bow to the cow”.
I’ve had well over 60 years of experience catching and fishing with live eels and have about a thousand narratives about my experiences with those deadly striper baits. For the sake of brevity, I’ll have to limit that to a few. Bass do not have the problems catching and eating hooked live eels as they do with pogies, live mackerel or scup. Back when we were using thick red monofilament cable for monofilament line, we waited for the bump which signaled a hit then dropped the rod and waited for the fish to turn and run, thereby flushing the bait into its mouth and down into its stomach. With today’s braided line and a Maxel reel attached to a carbon fiber rod casting and drifting eels is almost like cheating.
Old Wives Tale?
Nearly all of the old timers in my crew believed that once a fish bit or ate a bait or plug it put a certain “stink” on it which made it much more desirable to the targeted species. Regardless of your personal judgement on this old wives’ tale there is much more to this stink than a rumor concerning live eels. I have always found that an eel that had already caught a bass, usually became much more desirable to the next striper than a live wriggling offering. From a purely economic perspective I usually cast my used my eels until they fell apart as long as they catching. One of the photos accompanying this article shows an eel Charlie Cinto used to catch six stripers in a row and he used it until there was no longer any place to hook it so that it could survive even one more cast.
Cinto always wanted his eels back, even if it meant he had to go digging into a striper’s stomach right up to his elbows. We always fished conventional tackle because it was so much easier to keep the reel in free spool and release line upon a hit. Our rods were always fished high when retrieving so we could drop the tip at the first hint of a hit and disengage the levers. Since I began using the Tsunami Maxels, when they were first introduced, all it took was a turn of the handle to engage the reel and FISH ON.
There are numerous ways to fish eels, but my chosen method is to cast into structure and retrieve slowly or to add a rubber core sinker of a half-ounce or so and slowly troll them over the subterranean boulder fields. As a reader of this magazine, you should be well aware of the phenomenal success of Capt. Chuck Many whose planer board method is able to call up huge stripers from the deep. I’ve been live trapping and fishing eels for over 60 years and even a long time angler like me eventually settles on the methods that works best for them.
The dead eels, unless they are the ones that were sent up the leader during the fight and had no further damage than a few scrapes along their heads, were usually fished with a pinch on sinker to get them closer to the bottom, however the unique sound of the splash of a snake hitting the water is usually all that is needed to gain a striper’s attention.
While there are numerous ways to hook an eel I prefer to insert the barb under the chin, up through the mouth and out the closest eye socket. That is the most solid hookup and can withstand numerous casts before the eel needs to be re-hooked through the other eye socket. Hooking the eels under the chin and out the mouth results in a lot of lost eels that eventually tear off. I’ve seen many a tear when an eel breaks off, hits the water and is engulfed by a big bass on the surface. The same, almost white, eel that Cinto caught all those fish on was not done yet. On a dare I hooked it through the middle (whacky style) cast it out and allowed it to sink. I had a fish take it and run before it hit the bottom, but the hook pulled out of what was barely left of the then very soft bait.
Have A Cigar
I’ve been in numerous situations when we had blues on top and bass feeding under them and could not get an eel down to the stripers. The blues usually let go when they chop off the body up to the head then spit it out. Those same heads are often ignored by the choppers as they were cast and floated down through the blues to the waiting stripers below. I could not begin to tell you how many bass opened up their big maw and swallowed those heads hole. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.
We are all aware of the familiar expression that a striper is too valuable to be caught just once. Well, the same could be said about eels as bait. Too precious to be used just once. If I had a dollar for every eel that was lost on the first cast from my boat, I would be writing this from the trunk cabin of a completely restored 30-foot MacKenzie sportfisherman.
The longer some people fish the more they tend to take things for granted. I’ve fished through a few worm diggers’ strikes and a scarcity of bass eels and was able to adapt. I can state without reservation that eels, once a stripers puts their “stink” on them, are that much more appealing to those seven striped fish.
