For centuries, eel fishing on the Rhine River relied on a remarkable vessel called the schokker, a flat bottomed boat with no engine of its own. Fishermen like Simon Wirtz and his son Wilhelm used only an anchor cable and a hand cranked winch to position the boat and cast a massive funnel shaped net into the current. This traditional German fishing method dates back to around 1904, when Dutch fishermen introduced the technique along the lower Rhine near Neuss and Grimlinghausen. Because commercial river traffic dominated the waterway during the day, schokker fishermen worked almost exclusively at night, setting position lights and lowering their thirty meter long net to catch eels migrating downstream toward their spawning grounds near Central America.
This film documents the entire process, from anchoring the boat and unfurling the net to hauling in the catch and cleaning the mesh of industrial pollution and debris. Viewers will see how the net's spiked inner chambers prevented eels from escaping once trapped, and how the family run business processed and sold their catch to local markets. By the late 1960s, chemical pollution had devastated fish populations throughout the Rhine, and a major toxic spill in 1969 nearly ended commercial river fishing entirely. Despite this, the Wirtz family continued practicing their inherited craft, preserving a fishing tradition that has almost vanished from modern Germany.