The Art of Eeling

Striped bass have a hard time saying no to an eel.

Sharpies have been using these slimy, squirming critters to catch stripers for more than 100 years, and they’re still popular for those who cast, drift or troll for large stripers.

Eels are a tough, durable bait with a history of attracting the largest striped bass found in coastal waters, from North Carolina to Canada. Three of the four world record bass taken since 1913 were caught on eels. That’s no coincidence.

One Story

I was dressed in a shortie wetsuit, standing on a rock at the end of Earth. It was June, and the water still had a chill, especially after dark. A folded multitool was shoved under the neoprene of my left short sleeve and a dry eel rag was tucked under the right. I held a stiff 10½-foot G. Loomis rod with major pulling power. I imagined it was my elephant gun for big stripers.

The reel was an old-school, manual-pickup Penn 706Z spooled with 65-pound braid and 50-pound fluorocarbon leader. The knots on the swivel and hook were good, pulled tight while moist, trimmed short but not too short. The swivel was beefy, and the 6/0 hook was new. This has long been my go-to eel rod for big fish along rocky shorelines.

A 12-inch eel writhed slowly on the hook as I prepared to cast. The eel had been chilling nicely on ice with a few-dozen comrades for a couple of days. I thumped it hard, twice, against the edge of a cooler to stun it, and then I inserted the hook beneath its chin and pushed it out the eel’s left eye socket. If I fish it long enough, I’ll rehook it through the right socket. (I may learn the hard way that karma is a bitch.)

Earlier in the evening, I reeled my eel quickly past the smallish bass that hung close to the rocks and batted it like a cat fooling with a mouse. I was not looking for schoolies. It was after midnight. The wind had dropped, the water smoothed, and the tide was mostly out. This was the witching hour. I’d seen two small lobsters in my headlamp as I waded to and from my casting rock, a good sign. The bass were grubbing for crabs, lobster and small ’taug or scup.

I cast and listened for the eel to land with a good plop. As part of my routine, I silently count to five, which is about how long it takes for a fish in this spot to find the bait when all the variables in this little world are aligned just so. The fish snatched the eel with the gusto of a kid thrusting his hand into a bowl of candy. I lowered the tip, reeled and when I came tight, the powerful striper powdered the surface, then ripped off line. Sweet music of the night.

About 15 minutes later, I sat beside a knee-deep tide pool, reviving a fish pushing 40 pounds. I held her by the jaw and moved her slowly through the water, waiting for the signal she was ready for release. The shallows crackled with life, and everything was right in my world.

An Intense Hit

Veteran surf angler Pat Abate gave me advice more than 30 years ago that has served me well: “If you want to find out if a place holds big fish,” he said, “fish it with eels.” I reminded him recently of that conversation.

“It’s a good search bait if you’re looking to figure a new place out,” said Abate, who is 79 and a former tackle shop owner. He prefers casting rigged eels to live ones. “The thing I like about fishing rigged eels is the hit. When they hit it, they hit it hard. It’s such an intense hit. It’s like jigging wire.”

He also noted that a “rigged eel is more like fishing a plug.” Abate finds casting and slow-retrieving live eels monotonous. “When it’s good, it’s great,” he said. “When it’s not, it’s boring.” Other than the difficulty casting for distance with an eel, Abate said, “Eels have everything going for them.” They have a large profile. They emit a scent. And surf fishermen using rigged eels don’t have to worry about keeping them alive.

Eels are just one of the many baits on which bass feed. “It’s a bait of opportunity, like a crab,” Abate said. When stripers are feeding along the bottom, they’re likely to eat whatever they encounter: a small tautog, porgy, crab, lobster or an eel. A multiyear Massachusetts survey found 48 prey items in the stomachs of 3,000 stripers feeding in estuaries, off beaches and rocky shores, and in offshore waters. Stripers aren’t fussy, but they have their favorite foods. Eels are certainly among them.

“When the going gets really tough, pull out the rigged eel,” Abate said. “It’s the real thing.”

Not My Thing

Eels are not for everyone. Most striper chasers throw artificial lures on spinning gear. A growing contingent is wedded to the fly rod, which also can be effective under the right conditions.

No matter how you spin it, eels simply aren’t as easy or convenient to handle or fish as a plug, bucktail or metal lure. If you can’t get used to the snake-like creatures occasionally wrapping themselves around your wrist and forearm, eels are not for you. Many were the mornings I’d wake and find dried eel slime on my forearms and even my face. It’s just part of the game.

And while eels are among the hardiest of natural baits, you can’t just throw them in a bucket and forget about them. When I’d fish Cuttyhunk for a week, I’d bring six dozen eels, keeping half in the water in a bait car and the rest in a large cooler chilled with small freezer bags filled with ice, which had to be replenished several times a day. It wasn’t difficult, but it required diligence, especially on warm days.

A couple of seasons back, I was changing rocks at night, using my rod as a wading staff. In the process, the baited eel that I’d hung from a guide had come loose and somehow snagged the LED beanie on my head. I watched for a few moments as a 10-inch eel swung back and forth, just inches in front of my face. I swore at it, then laughed.

Eels also have an uncanny ability to turn leaders into webs of knots, sometimes with the eels themselves embedded and even knotted in the middle of the mess. They need to be stunned before you slip one onto a hook. A dry rag is essential for grasping them. “You have to smash them,” says Greg Myerson, a longtime eel aficionado who holds the striper world record with an 81.88-pounder taken on a three-way rig baited with a live eel. “I grab one as far back as I can and give it a good shot in the head. Two for good measure. It’s kind of barbaric, but that’s fishing, I guess.” I hold them by the head and smack their tails hard against the edge of the cooler or gunnel.

As hard as they are for humans to handle, once a hefty bass grabs an eel, it typically holds on to the bait. Stripers have a mouth “that only goes one way,” Myerson says. “Even a slimy eel is not going to come back out.”

It’s been my experience, as well as those of other anglers I’ve interviewed, that the preponderance of stripers taken on circle hooks and eels are hooked in the mouth. I rarely gut-hook fish.

Bait Bias

There exists a bias in some circles against fishing eels or any natural bait. Some believe that fooling a fish on a plug or fly requires more skill and, therefore, represents a higher level of sportsmanship. While talking fishing with an acquaintance over pints in a pub, he told me about an outing on his boat where he and friends found a nice daytime bite on surface plugs. I volleyed with a story from the previous week, when we had taken some nice fish at night, also from the boat.

“Eels?” he sniffed arrogantly. “Isn’t that rather like fishing for trout with worms?” The insinuation was hard to miss: Fishing with natural bait is unfair, almost cheating. I’ll match his arrogance with some of my own. The truth is, the gentleman at the bar would not have fished those rocky waters in the dark like we did, not for all the pints in the pub. He was a fair-weather, daytime fisherman, and those folks certainly catch their share of stripers when the fish are chasing bait on top. They just don’t do particularly well on large fish. If your goal is hooking a large striper, fish eels after dark.

Mysterious Fish

Since the earliest times, humankind has had trouble understanding the life history of the eel. Aristotle thought they came from the “entrails of the Earth.” Pliny the Elder believed that baby eels sprung from particles lost by adult eels when they rubbed their bodies on riverbeds. And English countryfolk thought that eels were propagated when hairs from a horse’s tail fell into the water.

Eels are not entirely understood. “There are still a lot of mysteries,” says James Prosek, the painter and author who wrote the book Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Mysterious Fish (Harper Perennial). The line that Prosek heard most often during his research was, “We just don’t know.”

Prosek calls the annual migration of millions of eels from freshwater rivers, lakes and estuaries to their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea in the western Atlantic one of the “greatest unseen migrations” of any creature on Earth. Striped bass are an anadromous species, spawning in fresh water and living in salt. Eels are catadromous, meaning they spawn in salt water and live most of their lives in fresh.

“They almost feel like the embodiment of water or the manifestation of a current,” says Prosek, who also is the author of Trout: An Illustrated History and Joe and Me: An Education in Fishing and Friendship. Prosek says eels taught him to appreciate things that can’t be totally understood. “I was blown away when I learned that the eels in the pond next to my house were spawning thousands of miles away in the middle of the Atlantic,” he says. “I admire their relentlessness and their patience.”

The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) develops over several life stages: leptocephali, glass eels or elvers, yellow eels, which anglers use as bait, and the sexually mature silver eel. Eels are believed to take eight to more than 24 years to reach sexual maturity.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission says the American eel stock is at or near “historically low levels” due to overfishing, habitat loss, changes in food webs, turbine mortality, environmental changes, toxins, and contaminants and disease. The commission has declared the stock “depleted” and says it will look for ways to reduce mortality and increase conservation. Eels are an important food source for many fish, marine mammals and fish-eating birds. “They are being confronted by rapid changes that are unprecedented,” Prosek says.

Prosek did clear up something that I’d often heard growing up: Old-timers used to say that striped bass didn’t so much as eat eels out of hunger as they did to kill them for feeding on their eggs. It’s another example of humankind’s ongoing misunderstanding of eels. “No,” Prosek says. “I don’t think there’s any vengeance thing going on.”

Record Catches

Eels indeed have long been magnets for record bass. Charles Church set the striper world record in August 1913 when he landed a 73-pound linesider on a live eel from a skiff on the south side of Nashawena Island, just east of Cuttyhunk Island in Massachusetts. I’ve read reports that Church was casting the eel, while others maintain that he was trolling it under oars or sail. Regardless, the south side of the Elizabeth Islands remains a prime spot for big bass. Church’s record lasted a remarkable 68 years.

That 1913 record was broken in July 1981 by Bob Rocchetta, a charter captain and former commercial hook-and-liner who caught a 76-pound striper drifting a live eel on a three-way rig at night off Montauk, New York, on his 24-foot Rainbow II. “If I had to pick one lure or bait, I’d pick an eel,” the 75-year-old skipper told me recently. “That would be the choice. At night, it’s still a prime-time bait.”

Rocchetta is still chartering. He’s given up night fishing but says he still caught plenty of hefty stripers this past season on eels drifted in deep water in the afternoon. He also says he did well trolling artificial eels made from black surgical tubing on lead-core line.

Rocchetta’s record was broken by Albert McReynolds, who caught a 78.8-pound striper in September 1982, off a jetty in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the midst of a nor’easter. He caught the jumbo bass on a 5½-inch Rebel swimmer on 20-pound test, a catch that was dogged by doubts. The fight was said to have lasted one hour and 20 minutes in heavy surf. McReynolds nabbed the world record and $250,000 in prize money offered by a tackle manufacturer, but the fish only seemed to bring more angst than joy to the angler’s already difficult life. McReynolds died in 2020. As someone once told me about the McReynolds’ record: “The fish deserved better.”

The current world-record striper was caught by Myerson in 2011 drifting a live eel on a three-way rig on an August evening off Southwest Reef in Long Island Sound. “Big bass are different than 30-pounders,” says Myerson, the inventor of the RattleSinker and a winner on the television show Shark Tank. “They don’t want to chase things around. They just want to sit behind a big rock and eat 2-pound lobsters.”

Stripers are opportunistic feeders. Their diverse diet and the fact that they’ll often eat whatever is in front of them are among the reasons the species has been successful. “The eel is always a good bait for stripers,” says Myerson, who is 55 and lives in East Haddam, Connecticut. “I’ve fished eels since I was a kid. I don’t think a striper will ever pass up an eel.”

Myerson, who says he has released at least one bass larger than his record fish, can only speculate why bass are so attracted to eels. “To them, it looks like something they can easily eat,” he says.

Myerson says he designed the RattleSinker — which has ball bearings inside it — to imitate the “clicking” sound that lobsters make with their antennae. “I’ve found lobsters weighing 2 pounds inside stripers,” he says. Myerson says there is a boulder in 55 feet of water on Southwest Reef behind which he has taken many fish in the 50-pound range, along with fish weighing 69 and 73 pounds, in addition to his record fish.

Eels are a durable bait, and it’s not unusual to take several bass on a single eel. Myerson once caught 15 on the same critter. “It was long dead and so hammered,” he recalls. “I think of an eel as a three striped bass minimum. It’s a tough bait.”

I checked my journals and found a night when I took nine bass off a beach on the same eel. As durable as they are, a bluefish can quickly turn them into chunks.

Like everything, eels have gone up in price. I buy eels at Ted’s Bait and Tackle in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. When proprietor Ted Lemelin started selling eels in 1971, he charged 10 cents apiece. The price this past season was $2 an eel, or $20 a dozen.

Another Level

New Jersey angler Chuck Many knows as much about trolling live eels for jumbo stripers as anyone on the striper coast. In the past 24 years, he and his friends have caught 110 stripers weighing at least 50 pounds, the majority of which were taken on eels. Many keeps a record of each one.

Many has pioneered the art of trolling or drifting a spread consisting of as many as 14 lines — 10 baits typically run off planer boards, five per side. Two more baits are set as much as 80 to 100 yards down the centerline behind large bobbers, and one or two others are sometimes positioned right off the transom on a weight. “All the big fish are on eels,” says Many, 59, a retired telecommunications entrepreneur from New Jersey. “The bigger they are, the more they want the eel. There’s something to it, but I don’t know why.” Last season he caught 14 stripers over 50 pounds, and that number will likely have climbed by the time you read this.

Sometimes his spreads consist of all eels. Other times he fishes a mix of eels and live bunker, or eels and artificial lures. “It’s not like I’m dedicated to eels,” Many says. “I’m kind of addicted to catching jumbo bass. With live bunker, I get as many, if not more, hits. However, the hook-up ratio on eels is a lot better.”

Photographer Tom Lynch and I fished with Many in mid-December 2021 on Chesapeake Bay north of Cape Charles, Virginia, and had a monster day. We had 11 bites and landed nine fish. The weights of those stripers on an IGFA-certified BogaGrip scale is as follows: 55, 54, 53, 47, 44, 44, 41 and 37. Lynch brought the ninth fish to the boat, which was easily in the 40s, but we didn’t bother weighing it.

Each bass was caught on a light conventional saltwater outfit with a top shot of about 20 yards of 30-pound fluorocarbon and the rest of the reel spooled with 30-pound mono. The eels were hooked on a single, in-line Gamakatsu 8/0 circle hook. Each fish was hooked in the mouth.

Many estimates that he fishes eels 40 percent of the time, bunker 35 percent, artificials about 15 percent and sandworms and other live baits 10 percent. “If you want a big fish, it’s on the eel,” he says. “Every time.”