Eels

As most of you will know, we have a creek that runs around 3 sides of our property. The kids enjoy exploring this creek, and we see small fish, freshwater crayfish and eels in it.

Braden, Jordan and Josiah love fishing in the creek, trying to catch the eels. So far the eels have managed to avoid getting caught, and just getting a nice easy meal instead. That is until the day we went to Muriwai Beach (as per the previous post).

After enjoying ourselves at the beach, we headed back to our house for a sit down and a BBQ dinner. The boys begged to go fishing in the creek, and so off they went, with a hand line, hook and scraps of meat for bait. Now, you need to understand that this is not the first time they have done this, and we are quite used to a very pleasantly quiet afternoon as they try unsuccessfully to catch the eels.

This time things went badly wrong (from the eels point of view). We heard yelling of "We've got it! We've got the eel!" At this point we looked out the door, and sure enough, they had hooked the eel.

Now, months earlier (in anticipation of the possibility of this very moment) we had made a couple of rules about eel fishing.
1. No eels in my kitchen.
2. The father of the successful fisherman has the privilege of dealing with any catches.

Lucky Phil - Josiah was holding the line, and taking responsibility for the catch. We hustled a slightly reluctant Phil out the door to deal with the eel, and grabbed cameras, knowing the boys would want proof of this momentous occasion.











And here they are with the poor eel that was then released to fight another day. The boys really wanted to bbq and eat the eel, but Phil convinced them that it really needed to be properly smoked to be palatable. Phil then spent the next several minutes rubbing mud on his hands in an effort to remove the slime from the eel!