Swimming With Eels

[gunna]

My daughters Gold Coast house backs onto a fresh water lake. She was wading in it today & a big eel swam past & freaked her out. She now worries about swimming there - might be a case of killer eels. I keep telling her that they are harmless. I swam with them in Brisbane creeks all through my childhood. What do people think ?? Do they bite or are they plain harmless ??

[Render]

Dunno about here, but I'll tell ya a tale about the Thames eels in me native London.

Back when my dear old ma was but a lowly medical student, she was doing the much-fabled anatomy dissection on a cadaver in the school morgue. They used to do that in those days... it's all 3D computer stuff now, not real stiffs.

The body she was working on was a suicide that had been fished out of the Thames the day before. He'd been seen jumping off Westminster Bridge and had turned up on the shores at Chelsea a couple of days later. Happens quite a bit in the Thames.

Now, as she made the incision to open the abdomen, something stirred within and a huge freshwater eel slithered out of the cut, having eaten its way in there.

You can imagine the pandemonium at that sight ;D

But the worst thing was the morgue attendant. He rushed over and grabbed the eel, dispatching it by cracking it's head on the stone table.

"I'll have that for me dinner" he said, completely seriously.

To this day me dear old ma can't abide even the sight of eels!

Cheers,

R

[Tony_N]

I'm with you gunna - I swam with them for years without them wanting to eat me (Render your story is up there for horrific honours with the picture of tapeworms in the sashimi eater's brain of a few days ago - since censored).

Now eel-tailed catfish on the other hand are territorial and will give you a nip and I suspect they might be swimming around with those eels that your daughter is seeing. I reckon these are more of a worry than the eels

Tony

[el_carpo]

Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhh......Myyyyyyyyyyyyyy......Gooo ooooood.......Llllloooooorrrrrddddd Render!!! :o

Your mom is my new hero! #I would have died of a heart attack on the spot. #No doubt about it. #That happened before or after the movie "Aliens"? #Cutting up a corpse would be tough enough. #Having some freak-arsed, alien, giant, corpse-eating river eel popping out at me would have been it for me. #Then some odd-ball comes over, whacks it and announces his intentions to eat the thing! #Yeah, she's my hero. #I bow to her!

[Fitzy]

I'll backup the above posts. I never seen a long finned eel give a living human any direct problems.
They give me the odd problem when they take a lure meant for other fish tho, slimey bloody things!
Tell het ot take a line down there with any old hunk of meat on the hook.

fitzy..

[Dug]

Eels? hate the things, I have never heard of an eel attack but I still hate the things. I have seen some with mean sets of teeth though.

I was once bitten on the finger by a moray eel but he was tiny and I had gloves on. It was quite cute really.

[blaze]

Had me hand up under a rock, face stuck in the sea weed trying to reach a crayfish and had a conger eel come outa the weed and attacted my face mask, bloody near had a heart attact on the spot
cheers
blaze
ps
2005 here now

[DICER]

Adding to this thread.....I had a moray eel swim into my BCD in the Tweed mouth during a night dive. The eel thought it was great, but I was thinking otherwise. Just prior to that stage, my buddy and I were contemplating a nice blue swimmer crab for dinner.

Render - was the Thames river species Anguilla urbanmythicus ?? :o

DICER