“That board has so much meat and gurry on it, the caretaker just might confiscate it and make a soup out of it.” Jimmy was kidding with Al who was busy at his eel skinning board on the covered porch at the Weetamoe Yacht Club. Al, and a few other members ran a string of eel pots which were used to capture American eels that were almost exclusively for the food market.
During the spring and early summer, I would work with a few of the old timers pulling their pots set along both shores of the Taunton River from up around Pierce Beach in Somerset to the Brayton Point area near the site of the now closed power plant. No matter how many pots I hauled by hand, it was always like opening a Christmas present. We never knew what there would be in a pot. I believe we averaged less than a dozen a pot once the season was well on its way, but I also recall hauling pots that bent under the weight of 30 or 40 eels stuffed into one of those long cylinders.
We used horseshoe crabs for bait and when we couldn’t get them, we used fish heads or broken clams and quahogs which caught eels but never as well as the horseshoe crabs. Eels were a popular food back then and some restaurants featured them on the menu. One very popular location some older Herald News readers might recall was Fred and Anne’s in Westport which sold Johnny Cakes and eels which were a very popular menu item.
That was how I came to know a lovely Herald reader who owned waterfront property on Drift Road in Westport that abutted the piers of the Hix Bridge north. She read an article I wrote about spearing eels through the ice and contacted the sports department and left her phone number. I promptly returned her call and promised her that as soon as I captured a “meat” eel in one of my pots, my wife and I would bring it down to her. She insisted she wouldn’t take it as a gift but would pay for it. I suggested we would argue about that when the time came.
One early mid-May morning, one of traps felt a bit heavy and sure enough there was this long and very thick eel in the cylinder along with a few other bass eels that I would use for striper fishing. A call was made, and a meeting was set up, but under certain conditions. The lovely lady was 89 at the time of our introduction and she was still driving her car. She explained that she was taking her dinner meals at Marguerites Restaurant on Main Road and had to be there and back home before dark because she was unable to drive with headlights in her eyes.
My bride and I met her on an early mid-week afternoon and brought her the eel which I had skinned and cleaned. We could not believe how excited she was to actually have a freshly caught eel and told us how many ways she intended to prepare it. Although she insisted on paying for it, we arrived at an agreement. I would come back to do some blueshell crabbing from her docks if I was ever up that way. The lady pointed me toward a staircase and told me there was an old (very old) rod and reel on the first landing and she wanted me to have it. It was an old split bamboo rod with an Ocean City reel with a frozen handle and spool, but I thanked her and helped her out the door as she was leaving for the restaurant and her dinner.
I gave her a few more eels that summer and one Sunday afternoon we baited and netted blueshell crabs off her dock and went home with over a dozen. The meal of tasty crabs more than offset the trip to deliver the eels.
I received quite an education from those old eel pot fishermen and decided it would make an ideal parttime job whenever I needed some extra money. I eventually bought some galvanized wire and had one of the old timers “knit” me some narrowing twine heads that would allow the eels to get in to the bait, but they were tapered to an almost closed position to prevent them from getting out. There were some pirates in those days and they would pull the pots and take the eels or steal the pots and all the line at night when they were digging quahogs illegally on the mud flats of the river. I recount here the punishment for such a deed once one of my mentors found out who was stealing his gear.
A Bristol R.I fisherman of my friend’s acquaintance told him he saw two of his signature eel pots in the bottom of a boat owned by one of the men they called the River Pirate. Our eel potter made a visit to that area at the bottom of State Street to confirm the theft and left quietly but ripping mad. One afternoon I came into the club where the caretaker and one of his friends was trying to convince the man who had been robbed not to carry out his mission of revenge because it was too dangerous, and he might be caught. His response was, “I am going to send every pirate on this river a message they will never forget.”
Two days later there were murmurs and snickering on the back porch as the old timers were talking about the fire and explosion at the commercial dock in Bristol the night before. I spoke with the caretaker and Al who confirmed that our friend had visited the location of the thief’s boat well after midnight with a friend who drove and served as a lookout. The injured party poured a two-gallon can of gasoline into the wooden work boat then tossed his lit Zippo lighter into the hull which ignited into a raging fire.
A few days later the man who had extracted what some called an extreme revenge was at the skinning board preparing a bunch of eels for market. I walked over and began to help by disposing of the heads, skins and guts until he stopped and looked me in the eye. “I’m sure you’ve heard about my visit to Bristol the other night, so I want to set the record straight with you. Do you recall the story that was going around this spring about the lobsterman who shot another man who was setting his traps right on top of his while stealing lobsters from him?” I nodded in the affirmative. He went onto explain that the man who had been stealing his eels as well as his pots had been doing this for some time to him and others, but everyone was afraid to confront the thief.
“Sometimes it takes an act of violence to send a message and the only thing I regret about my actions is that I lost a damn good Zippo lighter that night.” He smiled at me and told me that in this world there were people who would take advantage of honest but timid individuals and if not checked the abuse not only continues but it escalates. He told me that he was not suggesting I burn someone’s boat or resort to violence, but that if I didn’t stand up for myself and others too weak to defend themselves, I would have to suffer the consequences.
I took his advice to heart.
Today eels are difficult to come by and only a very few people still set pots but in this era. They are directing their efforts at bait eels, the kind used for stripers which sell for as much as $2 and $3 each in the fall on Cape Cod. Our eel fishery is a shadow of the robust fishery it was in the late 1950’s and early 60’s but there are still quite a few people who enjoy them.
My mom was a big fan of fresh fried eels and I can still see those fresh caught eels, dipped in egg and rolled in spiced flower, frying in the big cast iron skillet. With homemade French fries and a generous splash of cider vinegar, they were delicious and eaten like corn on the cob.
The lovely lady from Westport and our healthy eel fishery are distant but fond memories of those days that linger and come to life every time I hook an eel in the pursuit of stripers.