ANOTHER GIANT EEL (Or - once again - perhaps not)

GIANT EEL ATTACK (Or perhaps not)

DALE DRINNON: More Super-Eels

Left: Titanoconger R: Megaconger

Again from Charles Gould Mythical Monsters:

(Continuing after the Pauline section)
A remarkable and independent corroboration of modern date comes from the Japan seas. It was reported both in local papers and in the San Francisco Californian Mail-Bag for 1879, from which I extract the notice and the illustrative cuts (Fig. 75).

“The accompanying engravings are fac-similes of a sketch sent to us by Captain Davidson, of the steamship Kiushiu-maru, * and is inserted as a specimen of the curious drawings which are frequently forwarded to us for insertion. Captain Davidson's statement, which is countersigned by his chief officer, Mr. McKechnie, is as follows:—

“‘Saturday, April 5th, at 11.15 A.M., Cape Satano distant about nine miles, the chief officer and myself observed a whale jump clear out of the sea, about a quarter of a mile away.

“‘Shortly after it leaped out again, when I saw there was something attached to it. Got glasses, and on the next leap distinctly saw something holding on to the belly of the whale. The latter gave one more spring clear of the water, and myself and chief officer then observed what appeared to be a creature of the snake species rear itself about thirty feet out of the water. It appeared to be about the thickness of a junk's mast, and after standing about ten seconds in an erect position, it descended into the water, the upper end going first. With my glasses I made out the colour of the beast to resemble that of a pilot fish"

In this case (and not the others) I DO think the object depicted is more likely to be a large conger eel, and this again counter to Heuvelmans: Heuvelmans says that the creature seems to be holding onto the whale's belly when actually a large conger-type eel should be holding onto a fin - but my reading of the picture is that the eel-like creature actually is holding onto the whale's pectoral flipper. It is in just the right position for that.


Heuvelmans mentions in a footnote that Gould mentions several reports of large conger-like eels around Singapore but he does not include them in his catalogue of reports. Here is the pertinent passage from C. Gould:

It is an open question whether conger eels may not exist, in the ocean depths, of far greater dimensions than those of the largest individuals with which we are acquainted. Major Wolf, who was stationed at Singapore while I was there in 1880, gave me information which seems to corroborate this idea. He stated that when dining some years before with a retired captain of the 39th Regiment, then resident at Wicklow, the latter informed him that, having upon one occasion gone to the coast with his servant in attendance on him, the latter asked permission to cease continuing on with the captain in order that he might bathe. Having received permission, he proceeded to do so, and swam out beyond the edge of the shallow water into the deep. A coastguardsman, who was watching him from the cliff above, was horrified to see something like a huge fish pursuing the man after he had turned round towards the shore. He was afraid to call out lest the man should be perplexed. The man,
p. 328 however, heard some splash or noise behind him, and looked round and saw a large head, like a bull-dog's head, projecting out of the water as if to seize him. He made a frantic rush shoreways, and striking the shallow ground, clambered out as quickly as possible, but broke one of his toes from the violence with which he struck the ground. This story was confirmed by a Mr. Burbidge, a farmer, who stated that on one occasion when he himself was bathing within a mile or so of the same spot, the water commenced swirling around him, and that, being alarmed, he swam rapidly in, and was pursued by something perfectly corresponding with that described by the other narrator, and which he supposed to be a large conger eel. In each case the length was estimated at twenty feet. Mr. Gosse gives the greatest length recorded at ten feet.

Gould also lists several other reports in the vicinity but without enough detail that we could tell if they were the same type or not. Heuvelmans is, however, of the opinion that most of the ambiguous "?LN?SE" reports from the Indian Ocean are of the 'super-eel' type. These reports as listed above illustrate the two poles of 'super-eel' reports: there are bigger ones and smaller ones, each conger-like generally but distinctive in several ways. In his conclusions on page 563 of In the Wake of the Sea-serpents, he states 'the size of animals of this type is not usually said to be large-usually it is less than 50 feet...The curve of lengths given by the various witnesses has two peaks, one around 30 feet and the other at 100 feet. this seems to confirm that there are at least two types of very different sizes.'

In point of fact, the reports are very nearly even halves at both of the peaks, about ten or eleven sightings in the range of usually 20-30 feet but up to 40 feet, as in the Singapore congers reports, and then again at the larger size of the really big eels. The Kyushu Maru creature falls into the latter category, it is much too large and thick to be a giant squid's tentacle.

I have called the smaller type Megaconger and the larger one Titanoconger in my analysis, not so much as official scientific names as to emphasise that there are two very different types. The Megacongers are not only smaller, they have a more even overall colouration with lighter backs and darker bellies than Titanocongers, usually desacribed as having a brownish back and yellowish belly. They are usually seen closer to shore and seem to prefer shallower waters. The Titanocongers are darker on top, lighter on bottom and are often noted to have large eyes: they are also seen at shore but also more frequently farther out to sea, and they are obviously more pelagic in habitat. They may swim at depth, but I doubt that they habitually sim at abyssal depths, that was something which Heuvelmans need not have added.

I include my maps for the sightings in my analysis, which include some re-classifications from Heuvelmans's and some others from other sources, and some from folklore. Heuvelmans indicates that he thinks the Valhalla SS was an eel-like fish with a prominent back fin that starts abruptly far back: I have cropped an illustration of a regular conger eel to illustrate his meaning. I presume all of the Finback category would most economically follow suit: Bruce Champagne has a special category for this which he assumes to be Plesiosaur-shaped. That was Meade-Waldo's opinion: the creature as a giant eel would not have the four flippers below water as assumed and in fact in the Valhalla SS sighting it is possible the pectoral fins were pressed close to the body and missed (if it was indeed an eel. The reported proportions in the Valhalla SS sighting are rather odd if that is actually the case)

AN OLD CASE REVISITED: Giant Eels

Some Years ago we were involved in a hunt for giant eels in the Lake District, and in the wake of that particular investigation I was commissioned to write a piece for a regional news magazine about it. Although they paid me, for some reason or other they never published it. I forgot clean about it, but whilst rootling about in my archives in search of something else entirely, I found it and decided that it might as well see the light of day at last:

Without question the most iconic unknown animal [cryptid] is the Loch Ness monster. For centuries there have been reports of giant creatures seen occasionally in the largest lake of the British Isles, but it was only in the mid-1930s when monster fever hit the United Kingdom in the wake of the original King Kong movie, and the improvements to General Wade’s military road on the south shore and the new road on the north shore made Loch Ness accessible to the general public for the first time, that monster sightings began to proliferate. It would be a great mistake to see the events at Loch Ness in isolation. There are several other lakes in Scotland, quite a few in Ireland, and others dotted across Scandinavia, Northern Europe, Northern Russia, Canada, and parts of the U.S. where 'monsters' have been reported. Generations of theorists have speculated that these creatures are surviving prehistoric marine reptiles, but this hypothesis just does not make sense.

These animals would have been air-breathers. There are just not enough sightings to support a viable population of air-breathing animals.
There simply is not enough biomass in many of these lakes, including Loch Ness, to support a viable population of large creatures.
It is highly probable that animals such as plesiosaurs would have given birth on land. There have been land sightings but again, not enough.
The vast majority of these lakes would have been frozen solid during the last Ice Age.
There is no evidence whatsoever that any of the giant reptiles, or indeed any non-avian dinosaurs survived the mass extinctions which occurred – possibly after the earth was hit by a meteor - 65 million years ago. (KT extinction event).

My colleagues and I at the Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] – the world’s largest mystery animal research organisation - have believed for many years that if there are indeed giant creatures in these northern lakes, they would have to be enormous fish; probably eels.

On 23rd July 2006, between 12 and 1 o’clock, Steve Burnip, a holidaymaker from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, was standing with his wife and some friends on Watbarrow Point, a small rocky promontory just below Wray Castle on the western shore of the lake. It was a fine July afternoon and one of the warmest on record. They saw a disturbance in the water that looked like a boat wake. It was caused by an animal that appeared to be at least twenty feet long and was moving faster than a rowing boat. They saw what appeared to be a head and two portions of a long grey body, and although they watched the animal for approximately a minute, no visible eyes or facial features could be seen. Steve had a camera in his pocket – a powerful digital instrument with 8 mega-pixel capacity, but by the time he thought of using it, the creature was too far away. He did take a photograph, which we have seen. It appears to show several slate grey humps in the water, approximately fifty yards away, but for personal reasons Steve – at the moment at least – is loathe to release the picture to the press.

Another incident was reported by a Mr and Mrs Gaskell who had also seen the creature whilst boating on Windermere during July. They told us that the weather was dry and fine, with little breeze and the surface water was warm and calm. They have, on many occasions, seen fish jumping and surfacing in the lake, but on this particular day they were travelling about 4 knots near the yellow 6m/h marker at the entrance to the Ambleside basin, at the north end of the lake, when they both saw a disturbance in the water, about 20 yards astern. Mr Gaskell told me that they had seen something very large surfacing and diving again, which looked like a seal or dolphin without the fin, leaving a large wake and ripples. They did not see it again that day, or anything similar since.

Over the next month we received six further eyewitness accounts. Interestingly, one was from the late 1950s, and another from the early 1980s. The other contemporary sightings followed in much the same pattern as Burnip’s, but – for me at least – the most exciting account came from Kevin Boyd, an amateur diver who is extremely conversant with the wildlife of the area, and has seen eels of over six feet in length on a number of occasions, both in Windermere, and in the neighbouring lake of Coniston Water. He was enthusiastic about our quest, and offered to help us dive.

On 11th October a five-person team from the Centre of Fortean Zoology travelled to the Lake District for a three-day fact-finding mission. We were also accompanied by Jon Ronson: journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and radio presenter. He has been a mate of the CFZ’s for a decade and has long wanted to accompany us in the field.
On the evening of Thursday 12th October, just before dusk, Kevin placed a number of baited sacks out in the bay. Each sack contained cut up fish and squid, Predator Plus (a chemical that attracts predatory fish) and some rocks. Richard and I had carried out a similar exercise at Loch Ness the previous November, but were surprised at how difficult the process on Coniston was going to be. The currents were very strong under water, and the bait sacks drifted considerably.

Just after dark, he went back in the water, this time armed with an underwater camera, to see what he could find.

Richard and I had been planning this episode for many years. OK, we didn’t know it was going to take place in the Lake Distict but since the late 1990s we have been putting plans in place to do a dive for giant eels as and where it became appropriate. Despite claims made on our behalf in the media, we never had any great hopes of catching or even seeing an outsized eel on this occasion. The main point of this three day expedition was to meet the eyewitnesses, suss out the lie of the land, and – as far as the diving was concerned – carry out something of a dress rehearsal. No matter how many times you plan something back in the office, the reality is always going to be significantly different. It soon became clear that there were a number of things we had never even considered.

Firstly, we had always planned to dive during daylight or at dusk. Kevin explained that the eels come out to feed just after dark, and this was a contingency that we just had not planned for. The first thing that we realised was that on any future dives we would have to put lights on the buoys, and preferably on the bait sacks themselves. This will be easy to arrange using proprietry light sticks – tubes of chemicals that, when broken, emit quite a strong light for several hours – but this had just not occurred to us. Kevin was finding great difficulty in locating either the buoys or the bait sacks in pitch darkness, and I regret to say that this part of the experiment was a failure.

Another problem was the time of year: whilst all of us were aware that by early October eels usually either disappear to sea or go to the deepest part of the lakes to stay for the winter, we had hoped that because it had been one of the hottest summers on record and because the water of the lake was allegedly eight degrees warmer than usual, the eels would still be there. Sadly, this was not the case, and the anguilliform population of Coniston Water had followed the normal biological imperative and were nowhere to be seen. The water was also higher than normal – Kevin estimated by eighteen to twenty-four inches, and this would have affected the distribution patterns of the aquatic invertebrates on which the eels feed. Sadly it would appear that we were looking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kevin did manage to get some remarkable pictures of the lake floor, of pike and of perch, and all in all, although we didn’t either catch or photograph any eels, we felt that our first exploratory dives had been a qualified success.

The night was very quiet, and very still. Sitting and standing on the shore where the only illumination were tiny pinpricks of light from torches and the ethereal ghostly glow from Kevin’s underwater light, which would intermittently illuminate the water before us with a yellow green haze, was an enthralling, exciting, and oddly humbling experience. There are some people in the cryptozoological community who are scathing about investigations carried out in the United Kingdom. They seem to believe that true adventures can only be found in the jungles or deserts of the tropics. On this Thursday afternoon and evening I think that we have proved them wrong. David and I had come close to being shipwrecked, and here was Kevin risking life and limb forty feet below the surface of the water in pitch blackness. Surely, one could not ask for much more intrepid behaviour than this?

If we are to succeed in our endeavour in proving that there are indeed eels considerably larger than they are supposed to be in the deep waters of the Lake District, it is going to take a considerable amount of effort.

I am hoping that Eric Gaskell’s friends will come up trumps, and that we will have several boats to play with on Windermere itself. If we do, and if we can get permission from the relevant authorities to dive, I want to seriously consider carrying out a project similar to Operation Deepscan, which was carried out in Loch Ness in the 1980s by Adrian Shine.

I am also giving serious consideration to approaching the ferry companies. I wonder if they would be prepared to donate us season tickets and allow us to use sonar of the ferries that traverse large sections of the lake including the places where huge eels were seen during June and July this year. Kevin has pledged his support, and we are hoping that we will be able to get donations of time and equipment from other divers.

I am also hoping to involve various community groups like the boy scouts, the sea cadets and the angling clubs. As we scan the depths of the lake and attempt to the beasts with Predator Plus, I want as many ‘foot soldiers’ as possible stationed on the banks, and on the islands, with binoculars, long range cameras, and notebooks. This could be the largest cryptozoological investigation ever mounted on British soil.

If there are indeed large eels in Coniston Water and Windermere we are damn well going to find them!

OLL LEWIS: I Told You I Was ‘Eel’

A few weeks ago the CFZ took delivery of a small shipment of live eels, which would otherwise have ended up on someone’s plate. The eels themselves had apparently been destined for halal supermarkets, despite eels being a non-halal meat (halal food laws forbid the consumption of carnivores and consumers of carrion). As well as saving the lives of these fascinating fish, our main reason for acquiring eels is so that we can observe the fish first hand. Jon and Richard have suggested that sterile eels, that live longer and grow much larger than an eel would normally grow, could be the basis for many lake monster sightings in places like Loch Ness and the Lake District. There is some good supporting evidence for this theory, or certainly that eels in captivity live longer and grow larger than their wild counterparts; Blackpool Tower Aquarium is home to two very large common eels that have lived most of their lives in captivity.

When the eels arrived they were not in the best of condition; all of them had white spot, two of the eels were dead and one had had the end of its tail bitten off quite badly. Jon and I named the remaining 6 eels with names including Eel-ly Jenkins and Ben Eel-ton; the name I gave to the injured eel was Eel-ton John. For the first few days the eels refused to eat any of the tasty morsels I dangled before their mouths and Jon and I started to get worried. Had the stress of their transport left the poor little fellows so perturbed that they had lost all interest in sustenance? Thankfully I had the brainwave of turning all their tank lights off at 6pm so it would be darker in their tanks in the evening when they were fed and this seemed to solve the problem so soon the eels were eating up earthworms with some determination.

Once we had treated the white-spot all was well… until Saturday night, anyway. The other eels had started to gang up on poor Eel-ton John and his manky tail, probably calculating that if they took out the weakest of their number this would mean more food for them. In order to put a stop to intra-specific competition like this, my first course of action was to increase the amount of food and place it in more locations. The eels, however, just ignored the extra worms and continued picking on Eel-ton John, still reasoning ‘Saturday night’s all right (for fighting)’. All the while Eel-ton John was picking up more scratches, getting stressed and his tail had no chance to fully heal. In fact, out of all the eels Eel-ton John was still the only one showing any sign of infection when the white-spot had cleared up in all the others. Jon and I decided that the only sensible course of action was to remove him from the communal eel tank so he could be put into a smaller tank on his own and would have a chance to heel without any more bullying.

While I caught Eel-ton John, cryptozologist Jon scoured the internet and his books for suggestions to aid the eel’s recovery. The eel took a while to catch, but when I finally managed to catch him he looked much worse than he had through the tank's glass. I thought to myself it’ll be a miracle if he’s 'still standing' this time tomorrow. As far as the eel’s treatment, Jon and I eventually settled upon making his water slightly brackish as this should have a detrimental effect on any fungi, but be well within acceptable limits for the eel. We added 3 teaspoons of salt for each gallon of water in his tank and put the salt into a one and a half pint measuring jug and poured half a pint of the mixture into his tank at 12-hour intervals. This seems to be working rather well and after only a day in the slightly salted water he has perked up a lot and is enjoying all the worms he’s being fed. Eel-ton John’s tail looks better already and without the bullying from the others he’ll be less stressed and better able to fight off any infections in the future.

COLIN HIGGINS: Giant, hay-eating eel

One of my favourite guest blogs is that of Colin Higgins from Yorkshire, who - incidentally - was the winner of the compy in January's On the Track, where he won my ever-lasting admiration by recognising Surabaya Johnny by the ever lovely Marianne Faithfull. He also went on the lash with Shane McGowan back in his student days, and is obviously a very fine fellow....

R. Taylor, The Wonders of Nature and Art, 1780

“Some time ago in the last century, the farmers near Yeovil, whose fields lay contiguous to the river, suffered greatly by losing vast quantities of hay; for which several people were taken up on suspicion of stealing the same; what added to the surprise of everyone was, that the hay missing did not appear to be cut, as it usually is, but pulled out as if by some beast, but that appeared a little improbable, as several loads were lost in the space of a few nights; a circumstance so alarming to the farmers induced them to offer a considerable reward to any who should discover how their hay was destroyed.

A company of soldiers quartered then at Yeovil, some of them for the sake of the reward, undertook to find out the affair. They made their intention known to the people injured, who readily accepted their offer; and a night was fixed on, to begin their watching, in order to make a discovery. The appointed time came, and a dozen of the soldiers after eating and drinking plentifully at the respective farmer’s houses, went on their new enterprise with bayonets fixed, and muskets charged, as if going to engage an enemy. They had not been long in ambush before one of them espied a monstrous creature, crawling from the side of the river, towards one of the stacks of hay; he instantly told his comrades. A council was immediately called, and they all unanimously agreed, if the bear devoured any of the hay, that two of them should get behind the stack, and fire at it, while the others dispersed themselves at different parts of the field, in order to intercept it, if it escaped their comrades vigilance; but the precaution was needless, for the soldiers fired their pieces with such dexterity that they soon laid the monster sprawling. This done all ran to see what was slain; but the moon not shining very bright, their curiosity could not be satisfied; though some of them said it must be the devil, in the shape of a snake. Highly pleased with this exploit, they hastened to the farmers and made known how well they had succeeded in their enterprise.

Next morning all the neighbours round, with the farmers, their servants, and the soldiers, went to see this amazing creature, and to their no small astonishment, found it to be a prodigious eel, which, it is supposed, not finding subsistence in the river, came out (ox-like) and fed on the hay. It’s size was such, that the farmers ordered their men to go out and harness eight of their best horses, in order to draw it to one of their houses, which with difficulty they did. When they got it home, the soldiers desired leave to roast it, there being a large kitchen with two fireplaces. This request was granted; and after cutting it in several pieces, fastening each piece to a young elm tree, by way of a spit, they put it down to roast. It had not been above an hour before the fire, until there was as much fat run out of it, as filled all the tubs, kettles, &c., in the house, which put them under the necessity of going out to borrow; but at their return they found the inundation of grease so prodigious, that it was running out of the keyhole and crevices of the door.”

Quoted in Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life, selected and introduced by Jeremy Paxman, Michael Joseph 1994

DALE DRINNON: Giant Eels; Marine division:

Heuvelmans' "Super-eel " was a dustbin category but did contain good reports of evidently local, well-defined forms of outsized eels. The specific categories included a giant conger about 20 feet long seen off of Singapore (Heuvelmans indicates Charles Gould as a source and multiple local sightings), a type of "camoflage" eel in the Mediterranean and a much larger form with fins at the side of the head like a titanic conger with a characteristic dark top and light bottom (unlike the smaller forms). In the 1970's, I statistically separated the category and called the larger well-defined form Titanoconger and the smaller conger-like form Megaconger; the two apparantly are also different in habitat and coloration. I leave Heuvelmans' "Camoflage" eel the way it was without further comment. The more clearly-defined animals were the ones with eellike fins behind the head, but there was also evidence of a different giant eel with a blunter head and an unusual bichir-like set of backfins, but this was not so clear [The St. Olaf creature would be in this category and the original SITU document suggested the name Pluripinnium].
James Sweeney in his book Sea Monsters also indicates a well-defined form of Giant green moray, 20 to 30 feet long and centered around Fiji.


Similarly the reported sea monster that allegedly attacked Brian McCleary and companions rafting off of Florida in 1962 may have been a similar type of giant green moray eel in a completely different location.

The rest of the reports are difficult to categorize. However, once the sorting had progressed to this stage, it became evident by statistical comparison that the "?LN?SE" category had the proportions of the Longneck's neck and not the proportions of the forepart of a Super-eel's body. The eellike forms are much thicker cylinders per length, the thickness typically being 1/10 to 1/12 of the total length. A good number of Heuvelmans' longer-bodied reports in this category turned out to be wave patterns as in the many-humped and super-otter categories.

The Pauline case merits special attention. In checking this report, it became evident that ALL the mesurements were very severely off. Three male sperm whales were seen together, and each one was not only large, each one was unusually large. This statement alone is highly suspicious, given what is known of sperm whales. In order to be constricting the whale with two coils of its bodyand have 30-foot sections in front of this and after,the eel does indeed have to be 140-160 feet long; other commentators have not done the math on this. The original writer also evidently said "girth" (circumference) for diameter, unless the diameter was actually intended to have been less than a yard.

The dismissal of the Dana leptocephalus as a notacanth fish was premature: the reported conformation of the fins definitely did not correspond to that classification. In any event, the determination was made on paperwork when the actual specimen had gone missing. This opinion does not deserve the air of authority it is often given in the literature.

Giant eels, Freshwater division:

When he was advancing the theory that the Loch Ness monster was a giant eel, Maurice Burton noted several reports of river monsters that were like giant eels in Britain and on the continent, seemingly France and Germany. Sometimes, these were reported with doglike heads and serpentine bodies. no individual reports and no further details were given. These might be the same as similar reports from Scotland, Ireland and possibly Scandinavia, but these are mostly in the small "Monster" size range, 10 to 30 feet long. These would include animals called Horse-eels, Bethir and Lindorms. Occasionally, the conger-like small fins behind the head are noted and definitely described as rayed fins, hence they must needs belong to the Osteichthys. The number of segments in these fins seems to be about the same in the larger and smaller congerlike forms (8-9 rays being consitently cited)

Similar "eel" reports in a similar size range are mentioned as coming from Eastern Canada, including a report by a diver in Lake Memphremagog. Very Likely reports of "Primor'ye snakes" in far Eastern Siberia are also of the same sort.

James Sweeny[ibid] was told by Dr. MacGregor of Loch Ness investigation of the remains of a purported giant eel 40 feet long found in a lake in Uruguay, but it is safer to call this an outsized Anaconda, even though the reported length is unusual. There is no indication that any of the local witnesses knew enough to accurately identify the skeleton of a giant eel.

There is as so far no direct connection between saltwater and freshwater reported forms of giant eels. The freshwater reports are however consistent with the "Megaconger" category, averaging 20-30 feet long with a more or less even overall medium graybrown coloration.


PS, Heuvelmans In The Wake of the Sea Serpents is the primary source. My statistical analysis was my own work, of course. Eberhart should indicate most of the rest: Burton's reference was written before he did his book on the Loch Ness Monster.

GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD HOLLAND: Big eels in British Columbia

Once again we hand you over to guest blogger Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He is a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this is jolly good news for all of us..

Flicking through an old copy of ‘Wide World’ magazine (May, 1926), I find a few newspaper clippings which I hope will prove of interest. The subject of the sea serpent was a chestnut in ‘Wide World’, with correspondents regularly sending in info from around the globe to the editor’s mail bag. The first clipping, from a British Columbia publication, should especially appeal to Mr Downes, who has had notable success when it comes to elongate Anguilla:

‘SEA SERPENT TRACKED TO LAIR AT LAST – The age long sea serpent mystery appeared to have uncoiled itself today when John P Babcock, Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries, was notified that Queen Charlotte Island Indians had identified the notorious sea serpents of their neighborhood as huge eels which live there in large numbers.

‘John J Can Valkenburg who has been investigating the sea serpent story all Summer and who claims to have seen one of these interesting creatures, is responsible for tracing the monsters to their den. From ancient Indians living in the Queen Charlotte Islands he has learned that for many years the natives have been accustomed to catch astoundingly large eels at rare interviews. These eels, the Indians say, live in a dark, slimy cave at the northern part of the Islands. Here many years ago an Indian brave, aided by six logs [dogs?], did battle with one of the monsters and killed it after a fierce fight. The eel killed in this encounter was nearly forty feet long.

‘The Indians’ description of the eels, says Mr Van Valkenburg, tallies precisely with the strange creature which he saw swimming near his home a few weeks ago. “They have a very large head, big nostrils and the mouth is equipped with very long, sharp teeth,” he states. Mr van Valkenburg announces that he will shortly make an expedition to the home of the eels, invade their cave and kill one if he can, thus solving the sea serpent mystery for all time.’

Or not. Needless, to say, there is no follow-up. The editor does inform us, however, that: ‘Another correspondent in British Columbia tells us that some time ago he met two prospectors who had a nerve-trying encounter with a monster “snake” of this kind while cruising in the same vicinity in a rowboat. Both were reliable men of excellent repute.’

Several months later, in the August 1926 issue, we have a new sighting reported, and this time it includes a sketch of the thing. The following report was reproduced from the ‘Tacoma Ledger’ and refers to a sighting by Captain House, an officer of the Fishery Protection service, of the Canadian Government vessel, the ‘Cloyah’. He spotted the monster when the ‘Cloyah’ entered Wright Sound, 50 miles south of Prince Rupert, BC, en route to New Westminster. Capt House’s report reads as follows:

‘The first appearance was the object rising spirally out of the water and then straightening out to about thirty feet high above the surface, retaining this position for half a minute. The last position was when it recoiled back into the water, churning it to a white foam, and submerged in the same way as it came up, at a rapid rate of speed.

‘As the sun was shining through the clouds the body took on a bright glistening green and bronze colour. The head appeared to have several dark ridges, also long pieces of thick skin, much like kelp, hanging from its head, also shining as if water was dripping from it.’

Capt House’s sketch of the twisty critter is reproduced here.

The thing caught further south, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, was no less impressive but no one dared be so bold as to pronounce it ‘eel’, or ‘serpent’ or even ‘fish’. From the ‘Boston Globe’:

‘SEA MONSTER AT BOOTHBAY HARBOR. Aug 25 – The strangest denizen of the deep that was ever seen by fishermen or anyone else in this vicinity was towed here today from Monhegan Island by Capt Cass Brackett. It measures 33 feet long, is estimated to weight about eight tons, has an enormous girth and a mouth so big that it is said an ordinary sized flour barrel could be hidden away between its toothless jaws.

‘Scientists from the numerous resorts in this vicinity came here today to look at the monster and went away with the statement that while it resembled a whale and looked something like a shark they weren’t quite sure whether it was a descendant of the sea serpent or the devil fish.’

Surely they couldn’t confuse a fish with a cephalopod? A fish-cum-squid would be a curiosity indeed. Perhaps a ray is meant by the term ‘devil fish’? I know such vague archive reports have little value alone but I offer these here in the hope that they are not well-known and may therefore be useful to anyone studying the fishy cryptids of these particular regions who can add these snippets to their sum of knowledge.

Richard Holland, Editor of Paranormal Magazine (www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk) and Uncanny UK (www.uncannyuk.com).

GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: From the Mountains to the Fountains.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

I have read with intrigue the musing of author Frank Buckland. In his 19th century book Curiosities of Natural History he tells a fascinating little tale pertaining to London, and it’s many water fountains dotted around the West End.

Buckland, in the chapter Fish and Fishing, from the first series volume, speaks of how goldfish, once confined to a lake near Tsientsing mountain in China, originally made their way England, and also how such fish ended up in fountains around London.

He states, “They were first brought to Europe in the seventeenth century, and continued very rare in England till the year 1728…”

Buckland adds: “When they were cleaning out the basins of the fountains at Charing Cross (London), I asked the foremen if he ever found any fish at the bottom, when the water had been drawn off. He told me that sometimes goldfish were found, and that he imagined they got there out of the glass globes of the men who go about the streets selling goldfish, and who come to Charing Cross fountains to change the water.”

It was believed by the foreman that these fish might have escaped, especially when these fragile bowls often cracked, when being knocked against the basin. However, Buckland also goes on to speak of eels being found in these basins, and believes he may well have had something to do with such finds. He says, “Some four years ago, I bought in Hungerford market a quantity of small eels, and taking them home, placed them in a large tub; but they did not thrive, so I tied them up in a handkerchief, and transferred them to the Charing Cross basins. I heard no more of them till a friend told me of a paragraph he had seen in a newspaper, stating that some good-sized eels had been found in the basins at Charing Cross; and that the newspaper correspondent accounted for their presence by supposing, ‘…that they had escaped from the fish-mongers shops at Hungerford market, and had gone to the nearest water by instinct’.

This of course seems unlikely as the nearest water would most certainly have been the more accessible Thames, and Buckland argues, “..imagine an eel escaping from a fishmongers, crossing over the crowded Strand, and climbing up the sides of the stone basins to get into the water. I know that eels will travel from place to place; but I much doubt their ever taking such a journey as attributed to them by the newspaper correspondent, who needed not to have resorted to such an ingenious, but impossible theory, had he seen me put the eels into the basins some months before.”

GUEST BLOGGER GWILYM GANES: Giant Eels

It is always a pleasure to introduce you to a new Guest Blogger. Gwilym James first impacted onto the cryptoverse (hey, I think I invented a new term there, and if something as ungainly as `blogosphere` can become international parlance, then I am sure that `cryptoverse` can become the accepted term for the er... cryptoo, universey place thingy) when he became involved in a hunt for a crocodile in Swansea last year...

Back when I was engaged in hunting the elusive Swansea crocodile in 2008 a hunt which resulted in no solid evidence but did produce some media interest, amongst the various reports I received concerning the lake was the idea that a large eel seen in the lake by a local angler was behind the sighting.

Giant eels are an ongoing element in many of the weird lake monster stories in the UK. Suggestions that Nessie is one or more particularly large eels has been made a number of times over the years and the CFZ’s Richard Freeman is a prominent supporter of this idea of monstrous eunuch eels. The CFZ made an expedition in search of large eels in the Lake District in Windermere and Coniston water recounted in Eel or No Eel and Oll Lewis heard reports of monster eels in Langorse Lake as well.

A glance back through the historical record reveals that some rather large eels have been caught in the past in the UK and I thought I would gather some here. The current angling UK Eel Record: 11lb 2oz (5.03kg) [www.specimen-angler.co.uk]. This compares nicely to the report by Frank Buckland.

“The largest fresh-water eel I ever examined and cast was a magnificent specimen sent in May, 1878, by Mr. John Welch, eel salesmen, Billingsgate. It measured 4ft. 4in. in length, 10in. round and weighed just upon 10lbs. It was taken in the river Mole.” in "Natural History of British Fishes" (1880).

This eel is put to shame by the evidence seen by William Yarrell noted in "A History of British Fishes" (1836):

“I saw at Cambridge the preserved skins of two which weighed together fifty pounds; the heaviest twenty-seven pounds, the second twenty-three pounds. They were taken on draining a fen-dyke at Wisbeach.”

East Anglian Fen eels and indeed pike were previously well known for their size and abundance. As an old rhyme says:

Ankholme eels and Witham Pike,
In all England are nane syke.

Further proof of this comes from The Annual Register, 1827 p.30:

“Large Eels.—Two fishermen exhibited last week at Peterborough and some neighbouring places, two immensely large smelt eels, male and female, which were taken in Gunthorpe Gowt [Gunthorpe Sluice] in the parish of Tidd St. Mary, Lincolnshire. The male weighed 31 lb.., was 19 inches in circumference, and five feet three inches in length: the female weighed two stone, was 18 inches in circumference, and of the same length as the male. It is supposed that these two immense creatures had inhabited a cavity in a drain, near to the place where they were taken, for many years, and that the last hot and dry summer having forced them from their old haunt, they strayed into the salt water, and there became sick and blind, in which state they were captured.—Macclesfield Herald.”

Now this report is about triple the current UK eel angling record. Who knows what other monster eels are out there?

The recent post by TONY LUCAS: Giant eels in New Zealand shows how monster eels have been important in other cultures. There are signs this may have been the case once in the UK for at a Holy Well Ffynnon Gybi, or St. Cybi's Well, in the parish of Llangybi, Gwynedd in the nineteenth century a local remembered the fuss when “one day in the village at a mischievous person having taken a very large eel out of the well. Many of the old people, he said, felt that much of the virtue of the well was probably taken away with the eel. To see it coiling about their limbs when they went into the water was a good sign: so he gave one to understand.” Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx By John Rhys [1900] Given that Holy Wells are believed to be connected to sites of pagan worship this evidence is interesting giving rise to notions of strange rites of ancient druidic eel worship.

GUEST BLOGGER TONY LUCAS: Giant eels in New Zealand

Tony Lucas is one of our New Zealand representatives. We first published his work in the 2008 Yearbook when he wrote us an overview of New Zealand cryptozoology. New Zealand is a particularly fascinating place because of its zoological isolation from the rest of the world.....

Tales of giant Eels abound worldwide and New Zealand has its fair share. There are two species of Eel which are endemic to New Zealand. The Long-finned Eel - Anguilla diefenbachii (Grey 1936), they are known for their great size and aggressiveness, The other is the Short-finned Eel - A schmidtii (Schmidt 1927), a shy, retiring creature more common than its long finned relative.

The largest Eel caught was officially recorded at 5ft in length and weighed an estimated 46lb. There is, however rumour of an Eel captured at Lake Waitapiti weighing 120lb. Other rumours abound from different regions of Eels reaching 7-10 feet in length, having a girth as thick as a mans thigh and weighing on average around 80-100 lbs.

How do they get so big you may well ponder? It's all to do with age and senility.

Eels can live up to 80 years, and as they age, they become a bit bone idle and defy the urge to migrate and spend the rest of their days in freshwater fattening up, growing to gargantuan proportions. These colossuses prefer to reside in slow flowing, deep, vegetation filled streams.

The females of both species are generally bigger than the males; from this we can therefore deduce any extremely large Eel is going to be female. Another supposition that can be made is the fact that the Long-finned Eel is larger than the Short-finned. It is therefore safe to infer that any Eel of giant proportions must be a female Long-finned Eel.

Both species feed on living and dead flesh.

Not having any predatory species of fish in this country, such as Pike ect, they are the top freshwater predator in the lakes and rivers. Accounts of giant Eels, or Eel-like creatures, date back to the time of early Maori colonisation. One engrossing account comes from the Bay of Plenty, in the North Island, from an area near what is now Whakatane.

A giant Eel-like creature known as Tuna Tuoro occupied a local river, it is said that its touch was able to paralyse a person. Could this be an account of some hereto unknown species of Electric Eel?

A more contemporary account refers to a farmer from the Wairarapa region of the North Island.
As is the practice on many farms, he had just dispatched a sheep to feed his dogs.

At the top of a small cliff with a stream running below it, he proceeded to dress the animal, hurling the offal over the cliff to the stream below. Suddenly, he heard a loud turmoil coming from the base of the cliff and looked below to see the water boiling as two colossal Eels tugged at each end of the scrap of offal he had just thrown over the cliff.

With the copious food supply, lack of competition and ample ideal habitat you would think more Eels of giant stature would be captured. These giants, however, stick to the deep waters and it is said are intelligent enough to know all the tricks to remain hidden from the sight of man.