Catch of the day
In the hunt for elvers, competition is fierce and the rewards sky high.
By Adam Edwards
Telegraph, 11:59AM GMT 23 Mar 2010
It was, to be frank, not much of a night's fishing. Standing in the cold blackness with a miner's torch strapped to my head scrutinising a large cardboard box-sized net every 15 minutes was about as far away from conventional angling as a filet-o-fish is from a Michelin star.
Furthermore, after checking the net thoroughly, my catch was a single see-through eel-shaped filament that would not have supported a devout anorexic on a size-zero diet.
"They're worth more than gold," said Dave "Elver Dave" Smith after scrutinising my solitary fish. And it is true that the "Whitebait of the West", as the elver is known locally, currently sells for £250 a kilogram. On the right night, in the right spot, with the right kit, it is possible to haul out a kilogram or two, sometimes even three. That is a handy offshore account for the impecunious.
But after my thin night on the banks of the River Severn I was hardly going to spend, spend, spend. The elver may be fishy lucre to the hardy but for the rest of us it is easier to keep the day job.
The elver is the baby freshwater eel that is born in the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda and drifts over to Europe on the Gulf Stream in the spring.
The shoals that slip through the city of Gloucester on the night tide of the river are woven into the metropolis as surely as Doctor Foster and Beatrix Potter's tailor. The elver has fed and financed generations of the city, providing protein for the poor and pin money for the penniless. And today it still wriggles through the place like a golden thread.
Elver Dave, a print-finisher, casts his net from a small stretch of bank beneath Thomas Telford's historic bridge at Over most evenings during the three-month season. He is hoping that one night the fishy lottery finger will point at him.
It has taken years for him to establish his pitch and it has not been gained easily. At a bend farther up the river, where the elvers tend to congregate, there are regular battles between the rougher elements of the fishing fraternity trying to secure their beat. Many have now been forced to employ paid security.
And there was certainly a menace in the air the night I met Dave. Lights flickered along both banks like glow worms. Unsmiling young men in trainers and nylon bomber jackets briefly emerged and then vanished into the darkness while a barely visible motor boat raced down the middle of the river with shadowy figures on its prow.
"They're illegals," Dave said. "They'll have got a call on their mobile telling them that there are elvers down river." Night patrols are run regularly by the Environment Agency to catch and prosecute these rogue fishermen – but there were no officers the night I was fishing.
Elvers, known as glass eels, migrate upstream on the flood tide. During the ebb tide they move out of the current towards the banks to prevent being washed out to sea. And that is where they are caught during March, April and May by licensed fishermen (the illegal lot trawl the centre of the river). It is a trade that has gone on for centuries, mostly to provide cheap nourishment for the inhabitants of the Severn Valley.
Not so long ago the young eels were sold in beer mugs on the streets of Gloucester. Nowadays it would be easier and cheaper to buy a tin of Beluga caviar than a pint of elvers.
Today the elver is sold to the eel-eating Germans, Poles and Dutch, who all use it to restock their depleted rivers. It is also hawked to the Chinese and occasionally it will be flogged to a Gordon Ramsay or Marco Pierre White.
"At the peak of the season there are probably a thousand licensed fishermen on the tidal reaches of the Severn and I buy from all of them," says Richard Cook, the managing director of the Severn and Wye Smokery and one time director of UK Glass Eels, the last "quarantine" on the river where the fish are weighed and held prior to shipment.
There has been a huge decline in the catch of elvers in the past 30 years, mostly, it is believed, due to a slight shifting north of the Gulf Stream.
Pollution, man-made barriers to migration and in particular overfishing by continental trawlers are also blamed. The result is that the price has soared.
Dave Smith, with his bespoke elver fishing Land Rover and his £73 annual licence, is out to get some of that loot. However, there was little chance of landing a kilo of wriggling cash on the night I cast the cardboard box net.
"Every night's a gamble," Dave says. "I could be here for two weeks and not catch anything and then I have a lucky night. It's a casino."
I would venture to suggest that despite the nightly punt, the flickering lights and the criminal element, we could not in truth be farther from Las Vegas if we tried.
.Going to spend a lot of time after eels this year on a few waters which i hope will get my target eel 4 lb plus.Any one else be fishing for eels this year ?
