There’s a saying, you might have heard it: as slippery as an eel. Well, they’re not too slippery for Sharon and Ron Elton at Gippsland’s East Coast Eels. The fish are providing the Eltons with business parameters quite easy to grasp.

“What we catch is what we export,” said Mrs Elton from the company’s home base in Stratford, about three and a half hours drive from Melbourne. “We will never be able to fill the market. There’s just too many people out there. And even with the buyers we have now, we could never fill their orders. The demand is so high.”

Ron Elton has been an eel fisherman for 30 years. The company has three fishermen (all with the necessary eel access licences) catching as many long-finned eels as possible, for markets in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea.

“It’s all live export and they go mainly to a wholesaler and then they’re distributed,” said Mrs Elton. “The ones that go to Hong Kong go into China and I think the ones that go over to Taiwan go to China, too.”

East Coast Eels has been in existence for 11 years and exports annually up to 90 tonnes, with a value of approximately $700,000. While there are other eel companies in Victoria and Australia, the long-finned creature caught by East Coast Eels is only found in Gippsland.

“In other parts of Victoria there are two companies that export, too, but theirs is mainly frozen export to Europe. They do have a small market for live export into Asia, but not with the long-finned eel like we do.”
East Coast Eels are all wild caught. And unfortunately the ongoing drought has diminished this year’s yield.

“At the moment we need a lot of rain to flush the rivers to get them moving so our catch is down quite a lot – and so our export is restricted. If you don’t catch them, you don’t sell them. We can sell every eel that we get . . .”
The company is smoking eels as a way of moving into value adding.

“We have a small smoking market; it’s domestic, but it’s growing,” said Mrs Elton.

Apart from that, future planning for the company means shunting the boats down river and catching what’s there to be caught.

“We didn’t advertise, people just rang us and we still get a lot of people ringing and wanting our eels.”