Eel (Anguilla anguilla)
Current record: 11lb 2oz
Water: Kingfisher Lake, Ringwood
The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has one of the strangest life cycles of any UK fish. Every eel in British rivers and lakes was spawned thousands of miles away in the Sargasso Sea, drifted here as a larva on ocean currents over months, arrived as a tiny transparent "glass eel," then settled into freshwater to grow into the yellow eel most anglers actually catch. Years later, fully mature, it turns silver and makes the entire journey back across the Atlantic to spawn and die, a genuinely epic migration for a fish most people only ever see sat still in a margin.
That adaptability shows in where they turn up: rivers, lakes, estuaries, even brackish water, eels tolerate a wider range of conditions than almost anything else on this site's species list. They're bottom feeders through and through, opportunistic enough to eat pretty much anything animal-based, living or dead, which is exactly why worms, maggots, and small deadbaits all work well. Bigger eels will happily take whole or cut coarse and sea fish as deadbait too.
Worth knowing before you target one: European eel numbers have dropped sharply over recent decades, migration barriers like dams and weirs are a major factor, since they block the very journey the species depends on to breed at all. Many UK waters now operate strict catch-and-release or no-target policies for eels specifically, worth checking before you fish for them on a given venue.