Vanessa Becker-Hughes remembers when eels were plentiful on the Somerset Levels. As a girl in the 1970s she would fish for eels using a hazel stick and worms, storing her catch in her grandmother’s bath before they would be poached in milk for dinner. On a good night, she and her family could catch up to 200 using this traditional technique – known locally as ‘rayballing’ – to sell around the village the following day.
Last summer, Becker-Hughes decided to go rayballing for the first time since her childhood, after receiving the necessary permits. She managed to catch (and release) only one. “Relating that back to my experiences when I was 10 or 11, I felt a great sadness,” she says.
For millions of years, European eels have made their extraordinary migration from the Sargasso Sea across the Atlantic to the rivers of Europe. They undergo five metamorphoses over around 20 years, before returning to the Sargasso to spawn and die.
