| In the mid-eighties I was looking for a new water to fish for big tench in the Colne Valley and one of the waters I visited was utterly perfect. Beautiful, overgrown and full of features, it was mainly fished for carp but had produced a few big tench. It had a reputation for being rock hard but it appeared that as a consequence it was lightly fished. I enquired about joining the club that had the fishing rights and was disappointed to discover that getting a ticket would be impossible.
Twenty Years Later……. Nearly twenty years passed when one day Warren ‘Wol’ Gaunt called to ask me if I’d be interested in joining the very same water. Apparently it was now rumoured to contain some very big bream. These had been occasionally seen but never caught by the anglers fishing the water. I jumped at the chance to get a ticket and soon after it arrived I went for a walk round the lake with my girlfriend. Almost immediately the lake started screaming big eels to me and by the time we had finished walking round the water two hours later I had all but forgotten the giant slabs. At this point I would note that I had never spent any time previously in pursuit of big eels nor had I yet spoken to any other anglers who fished the water. I had no idea whether the water had been eel fished or if it had a record of producing eels of any size. I just had a gut feeling that I knew I shouldn’t ignore. Ten Minutes into my First Night I Hooked an Eel! Two days after my visit I arrived at the water for my first night. I planned to fish two margin rods and two distance rods both on low resistance running rigs with double lobworm baits fished over small beds of maggots. I had not had time to make any suitable lightweight bobbins and it was pretty windy so I decided that for the first night only I would rely on the baitrunners on my reels. I wanted to fish a swim in the area furthest away from the car park, which was a good 20 minute haul when shifting my gear. When I got there I was amazed to find that the one angler on the lake was fishing for carp in the swim I had planned to fish. We had a good chat and he informed me (later confirmed by every other angler I met on the water) that no one eel-fished the water but there was a rumoured capture of a 6lb eel by a carp angler a year or two earlier. Other than that the water had not produced any other large eels. I decided to spend the night in a swim about 100 yards further along the bank which was very overgrown and had clearly not been fished all season. I set up my rods and as I lowered the last into the margins, I felt what I thought was a snag. I lifted the rod and to my surprise an eel’s head appeared out of the water. The eel promptly went into reverse and managed to spit out my hook. I couldn’t help but laugh; I’d been fishing less than 10 minutes and had already lost an eel. Having rebaited my rod I crept up to the reeds and lowered my bait into the margins. As I stepped back up the bank I had to swerve to avoid a hornet hitting me in the face. It soon became clear that the hornet was not alone and I discovered that the nest was only about 6 feet from my bedchair. Luckily, although looking like giant wasps, hornets are not as aggressive and I didn’t mind too much sharing a swim with them. However they did keep flying across my swim and I spent the night ducking and diving like a boxer trying to avoid punches! That night I had at least half a dozen pickups. Most caused the baitrunner to start to move and then the fish dropped the bait. About 2am I hooked a fish that I got into my net several times but each time the eel reversed out. Eventually it managed to snag me about six feet out from the bank on part of a submerged branch. I managed to get the eel into the net but couldn’t get the eel and the net back to me.
After a tug of war lasting for about a minute the eel decided to spin and my Kevlar trace gave way. An hour and a half later I was ready for the next one. I played the fish hard and after a pretty impressive scrap I managed to drag it into the net. It was a short thick dark grey fish that weighed 3lb 10oz; my first deliberately caught big eel and a new PB. I’m Back in Two Days and Armed with Light Indicators To say that I had enjoyed my first proper eel session would be very much an understatement and I was very keen to try again as soon as possible. A couple of days later I was back and armed with some very light indicators that I had made the day before, I was brimming with confidence. I didn’t want to get into a rut just fishing the same area so I deliberately fished the opposite end of the lake. It was a very strange night during which I had at least a dozen pickups but each time, despite varying the point at which I hit the takes, I struck into thin air. I had fished three rods on worm and one with a head section of one of the lake’s thousands of small perch. When I retrieved the rods having had no indication in the last hour and a half of darkness all the worms had gone. The deadbait by contrast, had remained untouched all night. A Change of Swim Results in a Big ‘un The next session I decided to fish half way between the first two swims in a bay with a large number of over-hanging bushes to my right and reeds in front of me. The swim varied between 2ft and 5ft in the margins to as little as 10ins on a bar 25 yards out. I fished two margin rods and two rods on different parts of the bar, one in 10ins of water the other in 2ft. Just after dark I hooked a good fish on a margin rod in 3ft of water, which managed to eject the hook as I was trying to net it for the third time. There was no more action until 11.30 pm when I hooked a good fish on a margin rod in 5ft of water next to the bushes on my right. The fish put up a terrific fight and as I brought it to the net for the second time I had a bite on my other margin rod. I struck the other rod with my left arm and having connected with a decent eel put the baitrunner on and put the rod back on its rests. The first fish was eventually landed after reversing out of the net numerous times. Having made sure it was secure in the landing net I picked up the other rod and found the eel had made off parallel to the bank through a load of overhanging branches and was solidly locked up. I pointed the rod at the bushes and walked very slowly back seeing if I could ease the fish free and slowly it started to come back. I would move the eel a couple of feet then it would hang onto another branch. After another tug of war lasting at least five minutes, I got the fish into open water but it was far from ready to give up and I didn’t manage to land it for another couple of minutes. The first fish had looked good but this fish was much bigger. The angler who had been fishing the lake the first night I fished was fishing down the bank and had said earlier I should give him a call if I got any as his girlfriend who was with him wanted to see one. I shouted down the bank and they both appeared just as I’d unhooked the larger fish. The eel had been lightly hooked and the hook had partially opened under the heavy pressure I had had to use to extract it from the sunken bushes.
I weighed the larger fish first and it went 5lb 1oz with the other fish going 4 lb exactly. My third session and only a week on the water and now I had had my first four and my first five. I texted my former fishing partner Matt Alexander, who these days lives in the South of France. He phoned me back to congratulate me and pointed out he had fished for eels for years when he lived in England and his best had been exactly 5lb. Later that night I had another run on the rod in 10ins of water and had a third eel of 3lb 2oz. All of the fish were very chunky and grey/silver in colour. The next day I emailed Wol and then we spoke on the phone. Wol too had never fished for big eels but after I recounted my first few sessions he was keen to have a go at them himself. Next week in Part 2 – The eel hunt continues as Andy is joined by Wol and we read extracts from Wol’s diary
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