Moonlighting

In spring 1973, Michael Brown, a young freelance travel writer, took a phone call from a friend: 'Why don't you come down to Somerset and see these things called elvers - they migrate up river at night on the high tides and the local's fish for them. It's called elvering.' And so began a lifetime's career, full of ups and downs, as a self- employed eel fisherman: from the enchantment of catching them by moonlight, to driving them in battered vans across Europe, to smoking mature eels, to selling them - Michael and his long-suffering wife Utta have never looked back. A heart-warming tale of running a small business on a shoe-string; and a passion for eels which never faded.

Auteur

Michael and his wife, Utta, spent most of their working lives on the Somerset Levels, Michael involved in elvers and eels and establishing a smokery and later a smokery restaurant. Now retired they still live in the same house on the river Parrett where they stayed dry for over thirty years. Until January 2014 when one of the biggest floods ever seen on the Levels inundated their house and several others in the village of Thorney. They were to remain under water for over seven weeks.