Only in Maine could this be happening: a handful of commercial fishermen and women have struck it rich overnight (quite literally) from catching a baby fish that looks like a kid’s transparent gummy worm, but which happens to be a gastronomic delicacy half way around the world to people these fishermen will never meet.
This is exactly what has happened to roughly 400 men and women who happen to have the hottest commercial fishing license in Maine, which permits them to catch and sell glass eels, or elvers, the slender early juvenile stage of the American eel. Last year in Maine the elver fishery netted these fishermen almost $38 million, rocketing the fishery into second place after lobsters as Maine’s most valuable fishery. If you do the math, that works out to an average of $95,000 for each fisherman for about 10 weeks of effort.
To appreciate how this happened, it might help to know something about the following subjects in no particular order: Japanese unagi; Fukushima; aquaculture in Guangdong, China; East Asian water quality; the Sargasso Sea; and people who like to fish at night. Alternatively, you could stand in certain small tributaries of selected Maine rivers and streams, dipping a 12-foot long net on the dark of the moon for ten weeks running and not have to know any of the rest of this movie, except show me the money.
Since you are not likely to go elver dipping, I’ll have to have to fill in the blanks in the story.
Eels have always been mysterious creatures. They are anywhere from 2- to 4-feet long; they do not appear to have any scales; they are covered by a primordial mucuscious slime; they are voracious feeders and when caught by fresh water fishermen and cleaned do not appear to have sex organs. And oh, they are delicious to eat. Especially to Japanese palettes.
In Japan, special unagi chefs carefully prepare a variety of eel dishes, especially those concentrated around Lake Humana in the Shizuoka prefecture, which is considered to be the home of the highest quality unagi in the world.
Unagi chefs never serve eel raw, but fillet and then grill them on open flame to get rid of excess fat under the skin. Then they are steamed to make the meat fluffy and further drain out the oils, whereupon the fillets are grilled again on open flame while they are basted with eel sauce made from the trimmings, to which unagi chefs add soy sauce, sugar, and rice wine. Do not try this at home.
But unfortunately for the Japanese, and their Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese neighbors who all prize this delicacy, Asian lakes, streams and rivers, where adult eels spent virtually their entire adult lives, have become so polluted that they are no longer able to survive there in any numbers. So Japanese fish brokers have resorted to scouring the planet for eels to buy from fishermen who catch them in eel traps in rivers and estuaries on both sides of the Atlantic.
Until relatively recent times, however, no one had seen eel eggs or baby eels for that matter, which led a few inquiring biologists to begin tracking them as they migrated out of their fresh water haunts and eventually out to sea. Farther and farther out to sea, it turned out, until the eels disappeared into the remote parts of the Atlantic Ocean’s giant, circulating gyre south of Bermuda known as the Sargasso Sea.
This story took a turn when biologists discovered that the little glassy creatures that had puzzled fishermen for ages when they showed up in rivers and streams were actually baby eels that had drifted into rivers and streams from the depths of the Sargasso. Shortly thereafter it occurred to some enterprising Japanese and Chinese businessmen that it might be possible to raise said baby eels in fresh water ponds, feeding them like geese destined to become foie gras and everyone would be happy.
All went according to plan until an underwater earthquake unleashed a gigantic tsunami along the Fukushima coast, the center of eel aquaculture in Japan in 2010. That’s when prices that elver brokers would pay those sleepless souls who were dipping and fyking just for the love of being in the open air at nights between March and May skyrocketed. We are talking more than $2,000 a pound. Suddenly a good elver fisherman or woman could be making $20,000, $30,000 or more a night. And the dealers had to be trudging through the woods in the dark of night carrying several hundred thousand dollars of cash in their pockets. It was a heavy load to carry.
All of this is stranger than fiction. But thankfully, a made-for-TV movie for the Animal Planet channel is currently being filmed in Maine, apparently titled “Eel of Fortune.”
No one is saying much about the production, but it would be hard to beat the real story. One fisherman who made more than $100,000 last year was recently asked if he would be willing to be interviewed for the show. He replied that he would be reluctant to describe his techniques or location on national television, unless he’s compensated for it.
“They’d have to be offering a lot of money for me to want to do it. But I’m not saying I won’t,” he said.
You never know when lightning might strike twice.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute.
