Yellow eel is a fish endemic to the mainland, which is distributed everywhere except for some areas of the northwest and southwest mountains, and is most distributed in the Yangtze River basin. Fried yellow eel and long fish noodles are more classic delicacies. The face is ugly, the body is slimy, and it is disliked by many people. The most unacceptable thing about yellow eels should be the gender transition, the yellow eels that do not breed much are all female, and all become male after breeding, which is a relatively peculiar existence in freshwater fish.
The price of yellow eels has never been low, especially the wild yellow eels caught in rice fields and river ditches, and the price has doubled. Many anglers will catch a few yellow eels when they are children, and exchange some pocket money to buy candy and cards. However, the yellow eel is far less easy to catch than before, mainly due to the fertilization of farmland. However, in recent years, more and more attention has been paid to ecology, and the number of wild yellow eels has increased again. Yellow eel is a fish that comes out of the night by mistake, which is more suitable for night fishing, but it can also be fished during the day, and the key is to see the right time. Taking the Yangtze River basin as an example, April, May and June are the best times to fish for yellow eels, especially in the early summer stage of rice planting.
If you don't catch much fish when you go fishing, you can also look for small rivers and ditches nearby, and yellow eel fishing is also a good choice. From a cost point of view, fishing for yellow eels pays for itself. If you want to fish for yellow eel, you need to have a set of professional tools, the hook for fishing yellow eel is usually homemade, and there are hard hooks and soft hooks, the principle is basically the same, but the soft hook will be easier to use. In the past, I used to get a few spokes of bicycles, grind the threaded side into a tip, and then complete a small hook after burning red, this small hook does not need to be too big, otherwise the yellow eel will not be able to bite. You can tie a wooden stick to the other section as a handle, which will make it much easier to hold. This simple hook is a hard hook.
The soft hook is actually not much different from the hard hook, except that it is connected by a hose in the middle. A homemade yellow eel hook is inserted into a hose with the other end of the hose attached to something like a wooden handle. The soft hook is more effective because the eel struggles with the spokes after being caught, which is very similar to a snake and can easily unhook if you use a hard hook. But if the middle is a soft hook of software, the yellow eel can't break free, because it doesn't need any strength at all. Whether you are fishing for yellow eels during the day or at night, you need to find the nest of the yellow eel first. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to find the nest of the yellow eel in the wild river, long ditch, and even next to the irrigation ditch next to the rice field, near the ridge of the rice field, and you can clearly see the hole with the thickness of a finger.
These small holes seem to be inside small pits, and the vicinity of the hole entrance is relatively smooth, which is caused by the frequent entry of yellow eels, so that it can be basically determined that it is a yellow eel hole. The first thing to pay attention to when fishing for yellow eels is to use bait, and the bait is earthworms, but because the homemade hooks are thicker, you must use thicker earthworms. Hang the earthworm on the hook and then reach into the burrow, if you want the eel to bite the hook, you have to tease the fishing, and the eel must pull the eel out immediately after biting the hook. If a hard hook is used, then the eel must be held immediately, otherwise it will be easy to get off hook. The method of catching yellow eel is very particular, so particular that I know how to describe it in words. You can refer to the figure below, which is to lock the yellow eel with the middle finger, so that although the yellow eel is sticky and slippery, it is still locked to death.
Fishing for yellow eels should also pay attention to release, the small ones should all be female, you can release them appropriately, and only take the big ones back, because the big ones are all male. This is the result of the reversal of the yellow eel. Please pay attention to the collection and like, update on time every day, thank you fishing friends!