ANOTHER LIFE: Now the weather has got back to itself, perhaps the eels can go to sea. In September, when the moon was right - that's to say, dwindling fast towards darkness in its final quarter - we had weeks of trickling drought and not a breath of wind. What the eels need for their big autumn exodus is a black Valkyrian night of storm and rain, when the pulsing microseisms of low pressure run ahead to set the swollen rivers tingling, writes Michael Viney.
It's then I imagine the rush in the channel through the strand, the skeins of silver-bellied eels pressing out through the crash of surf and the blinding sand, and on into the ocean, setting their compass for Sargasso, 6,000 kilometres away.
It was on a night like this, in the early 1980s, that a small team of eel fishermen on the River Bann pulled their nets from dusk to dawn and landed almost 40 tonnes of fish. The history of men and eels is full of such heroic hauls. But, as a new book reminds us, these could be fast coming to an end.
The Book of Eels (HarperCollins, £16.99 in UK) is first a celebration of the extraordinary natural history of Anguilla anguilla, the European eel, along with the richly sinuous weave of the eel's relationship with man (not, perhaps, with woman, unless the eel is offered filleted and utterly inert).
Tom Fort is fishing correspondent for the Financial Times and there could be no more sympathetic witness to the often strange and solitary lives of eel fishermen with "nutcracker hands and sinews like hawsers". His cameos of their shadowy, weedy waterworld are beautifully written and often moving. But the forces that now threaten their livelihood have brought conflict, even fisticuffs and worse.
Most of us know at least the outline of the eels' migration to breed in the depths of the Sargasso Sea, and the equally improbable drift of the young back to the estuaries of Europe. Fort's book fills in the science (what there is of it: neither eel nor egg has ever been found in Sargasso - just larvae the size of pine-needles) and the raw ambition of Johannes Schmidt's momentous 1920s voyage to the mid-Atlantic.
Fifty years later, the teeming flow of leptocephali back to Europe, arriving as "glass eels" or elvers, still seemed inexhaustible: on France's Loire River alone, the catch in 1976 amounted to perhaps three billion individuals.
Since then, the whole picture has changed. The growth of eel farming, primarily to satisfy the insatiable Japanese appetite for kabayaki, has depended entirely on the supply of glass eels, mainly from Europe.
Although Japan banned the trade, to keep out a fish infection, China and South Korea did not. In the boom years, as Fort recounts, "men of oriental appearance with bulging pockets were encountered on riverbanks at the dead of night in the depths of winter, offering incredible sums of money to anyone who would sell them glass eels."
The European eel trade had always been, in Fort's phrase, "an extremely murky, volatile little world". As prices for glass eels suddenly surged as high as $440 per kilo, there were riverbank battles - even shots fired - on both sides of the Atlantic. In north-east America (which has Anguilla rostrata, a migrant almost identical to Europe's eels) the export of live elvers to the Far East by air was worth $4 million by 1992.
By that time, however, the baby eels had begun to stop coming back across the ocean to Europe. French rivers reported a fall-off of 75 per cent, a picture echoed in Ireland at research stations such as Burrishoole, above Clew Bay. The outward Irish migrants, too, have been in steady decline and growing significantly older - some of them female eels as old as 57 years.
The Toome fishery on Lough Neagh, the biggest wild eel fishery in the world, is also under strain. For a great many years, it has been stocked with elvers intercepted in the Bann at Coleraine, and transported for release in the lake. The elver run has always varied wildly, by millions from one year to the next: any shortfall in replacement has been made up by bringing in glass eels from Britain's Severn River or elsewhere.
Now, however, the prices set by soaring demand have made this prohibitively expensive. As Tom Fort reports, the elver runs into the Bann of the past two years have been the worst in decades, and Lough Neagh's fishermen are catching eels introduced a mere seven or eight years ago. The sombre mood in their co-operative (still held together by an ageing parish priest, Father Oliver Kennedy) frames the book's final chapter.
What has happened to detain the baby eels on the way from Sargasso could well be a result of global warming - or a natural, long-term cycle in the pattern of ocean circulation.
Ireland's Christopher Moriarty, well acknowledged in Fort's book as the island's authority on eels, is among those who suspect that a faltering of the Gulf Stream is to blame. He also holds, nonetheless, that there's no need to ban the eel trade altogether, just to manage it better. Either way, the eels will adapt and survive, with or without their human fishermen.