Thread: Silly boy and an eel

Love it!
It took about two milliseconds for the bravado to evaporate!

Hahaha. You can only tell yer kids so much. Then they got to figure it out themselves.

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Send the boy down here. We have a few he can play with

Poor boy went from hunter to hunted, the smile disappeared pretty quickly.

That eel had attitude and I must say your boy was braver than I would be.

He lucky the eel wasnt a couple of foot longer.

I had a similar experience as a kid. After seeing a large eel in a drain, I put the muzzle of my .17 BSA Meteor near its head and fired a slug. The eel thrashed about, making water murky, so I put my hand in search for my ‘kill’. A nano second later I fell backwards with a shriek, flailing the eel, now attached firmly to a finger, across my brothers face. The eel escaped with a fair bit of skin.

Classic alright! I recall a similar childhood incident to Ingrid51 up the Wentworth Valley out from Whangamata. My younger brother and I were out eeling with two of my cousins. Our ages would have ranged from 14 to 18 (I was about 16 at the time). Our eeling methodology was uniquely Rushy and involved road kill (possums and rabbits) and my grandfather’s slasher (it is amazing how many eels can be attracted by road kill in the shallows and how efficient a slasher is at beheading them). Anyway to the point, my younger brother decided it would be fun to put his finger in a rather big partially beheaded eel’s mouth to feel how sharp its backward pointed teeth were but he did not figure on the nerve reflex that caused the eel to close its mouth and nor on his finger being shredded when he shook it loose. Fuck the three of us not in pain laughed as only young fellahs can when someone in the group does something dumb. Having typed this has made me realise that I am the only one of that group of four that is still above ground and breathing. I could write a bloody book about our escapades as young fellahs.

When I was a young fella ( about 8rs old) many many years ago the local Lions club had a Fair down next to the creek in Henderson. One of the events was an eel fishing competition.......About an hour after the competition started there was much screaming and kerfuffle and an ambulance arrived to take one of the kids away. He had caught a large eel and after his father had unhooked it and thrown it up the bank, the kid was playing with it. The eel latched on to the kids forefinger then had spun around and completely stripped all the flesh down to the second joint leaving just bare bone...... They ended up having to amputate the whole finger.
That kid never went into or near water from memory until I lost contact with him when I started high school. The rest of us kids never swam in that part of the creek again when we were growing up.

Great video btw..

Originally Posted by Rushy

Classic alright! I recall a similar childhood incident to Ingrid51 up the Wentworth Valley out from Whangamata. My younger brother and I were out eeling with two of my cousins. Our ages would have ranged from 14 to 18 (I was about 16 at the time). Our eeling methodology was uniquely Rushy and involved road kill (possums and rabbits) and my grandfather’s slasher (it is amazing how many eels can be attracted by road kill in the shallows and how efficient a slasher is at beheading them). Anyway to the point, my younger brother decided it would be fun to put his finger in a rather big partially beheaded eel’s mouth to feel how sharp its backward pointed teeth were but he did not figure on the nerve reflex that caused the eel to close its mouth and nor on his finger being shredded when he shook it loose. Fuck the three of us not in pain laughed as only young fellahs can when someone in the group does something dumb. Having typed this has made me realise that I am the only one of that group of four that is still above ground and breathing. I could write a bloody book about our escapades as young fellahs.

Those years of childhood escapades are unique. My grandkids stare wide-eyed when I tell them what I did. Perhaps the most daring was to climb a tree as high as possible and give the OK for your mate to fell it. The ride down was (mostly) exhilarating.

I've been bitten by one when I was a young fella, wading under some willows with my arms outstretched above the water and it latched onto my armpit, squealed like a girl for quite a while untill we got it off and didn't live it down for years as was at school camp in front of all my "mates" who thought it was hilarious

Brilliant!
MB that’s a great golden clip. Dont taunt the poor falla to much eh
We had one on Dads farm that we trained to come to hitting a horse shoe on the colvert.
Feed him up on afterbirth and calve shit. He got bloody big.

Outstanding.

You can tell some people, and some just have to pee on the electric fence themselves......

Eel 1, Boy 0.

Round two?

" They can be a bit of a predator, "

@rugerman

Having been a keen Diver for years & with the Fiordland as our back yard we have had many bust ups with aggressive Eels over the years protecting their patch .My many encounters diving with them & like many growing up running amuck in the bush behind the family farm, with eels commonly being the feed of choice while all us kids went on our own camping trips ,lead to me always having a interest in them & if you do a bit of research they are fascinating creatures that science does still not know a lot about.

Scientists still do not fully understand their migration & breeding cycle at sea ,with failed GPS tagging due to the deep depths they swam at ,with one being logged at a extended time before being lost at close to a 1000mtrs & all swam too deep for light reception on the tags , many believe they Spawn in the Tonga Trench with one GPS tagged eel tracked off the coast east of New Caledonia. Also reading old historic accounts of shoals of the "Glass Eels' migrating back up the Waikato River & having shoals being observed "thick enough to walk over from bank to bank " that went past a stationary point for two days and two nights without stopping, showing what has been lost.


A couple of weeks ago l posted on a hunt where l head shot a Deer as it was crossing a rock bar in the river & fell into the river where l had to wade in to recover it , the water was crystal clear & freezing & much to my missus's amusement l elected to strip off to save having soaking clothes for the rest of the hunt . So l took my time wading across to the deer gathering the strength for the final family jewels dunking & its taking the wind out of you, as l looked closer at the deer l noticed the shot behind the right ear had taken the brain completely out & it laid on the river floor ,next to a large submerged tree trunk & already about a dozen Eels were out & feeding & aggressively attacking the brain .

After watching this fascinating sight for as long as l could tolerate the cold water ,l grabbed a leg on the Deer & waded it back out to the bank ,my missus who had witnessed all this yelled out for me to get out & look behind you & when l did 4 of these large Eel were in the blood trail of the moving deer carcass & 2 were actually latched on & did not let go until the deer was on the bank .

In all my years in the bush l have never seen Eels move so quickly from cover to "attack" a food source or so boldly .Here is a pic the missus managed to get after they had chased & latched on to the deer carcass l am guessing 20mtrs away from where they were feeding on the brain & totally in the open with no fear of predators ,me or the deer . You can still see the mouth full of fur floating above it, where it had bitten & held on as l dragged the Deer out of the water.

the locals in Taumarunui wont go near lake hawk....its sort of tapu as a young girl was drowned many years ago,believed to have been pulled in by the eels....the ones there look different,very large heads,Ive seen a couple in other waterways nearby the same.one of the local characters shot ducks on the lake,he said you had less than a minute to get bird off water with canoe before the eels would grab it...no way would you risk using dog on that bit of water....Ive had "something" amoungst the decoys in lake wainono,more than likely eel after the blood trail.