Cyde Weys Musings

Last weekend I went to Lewes, Delaware with some of my friends to one of my friends’ family’s beach house. Lewes is a nice town situated just inside Delaware Bay past Cape Henlopen. It’s near Rehobeth Beach, which is just on the other side of Cape Henlopen on the Atlantic Ocean proper, but refreshingly, it’s a lot less touristy than Rehobeth is.

On our second night there, after dusk, we went fishing on the jetty between Roosevelt Inlet and the rest of the Delaware Bay. A full Moon was out, providing enough illumination to scramble across the rocks of the jetty without necessitating the use of flashlights. We used whole squids we bought from a local market as bait. Nobody else brought a knife, however, and so we ended up having to use my good pocketknife to slice the squid into sections to be put on our hooks. It still smells faintly squidy.

My friend Bobby was using a lure with two hooks on it. He loaded up the bottom hook first and was putting squid on the top hook when an eel latched onto the bottom hook, which had just fallen into the water. He hadn’t even cast his line yet. He quickly pulled the eel out of the water, which ended up being about three feet long, and fought with it on the rocks of the jetty for awhile. It was flopping all over the place, coming pretty close to running into Bobby, me, and one of our female friends, who was freaked out and scrambling away across the rocks. It eventually gave up thrashing and just hanged on the line.

None of us had really wanted to catch an eel, however; we weren’t really willing to prepare it and cook it. So we wanted to let it go. Bobby tried to get me to step on the back of the eel so he could extract the hook from its mouth — but at this point, the group fishing next to us saw our predicament and gave us some good advice. “Cut off the lure,” they said. “It’s not worth it. It’s dangerous.” Bobby, listening to their advice, cut the line, releasing the eel, still trailing the hook and lure, back into the water. It could have ended a bit differently if we had tried to extract the hook from the eel’s mouth, because eels have a nasty bite and their body is one long, powerful muscle. Best just to cut and run.

Unfortunately, the eel was the only thing we caught the entire night. I got a nibble on my line and felt resistance while beginning to reel it in, but the fish escaped with the bait. Oh well. I haven’t yet had any luck while fishing in my lifetime, but eventually, that’s going to have to change.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 13:50 and is filed under Personal. Keywords: Tags: Atlantic Ocean, Delaware, Delaware Bay, eel, fish, Fishing, Lewes, Lewes Beach, Rehobeth, Rehobeth Beach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.