FOR PETE SAMPRAS 1994 was the best year since he turned pro in 1988

FOR PETE SAMPRAS, 1994 was the best year since he turned pro in 1988. He won more titles - 10 - than ever before, including the Australian Open, Wimbledon, and, to round things off in November, the ATP world championship. It gives the salmon a few weeks when they can run upriver without being netted, speared or poisoned." It's not much consolation for the eels, though.. On some Welsh rivers like the Wye and the Severn, the gangs are so aggressive that even the police are unwilling to intervene. Bailiffs turn a blind eye rather than risk being beaten up.As one bailiff told me: "It's a bit of a blessing, because at least when these gangs are netting eels, they are not poaching salmon.

But there is talk of people earning more than pounds 20,000 for a couple of months' work. Although the National Rivers Authority issues netting licences for hand-held scoop nets, illegal gangs using large nets can make up to pounds 3,000 a night.Most netters are unwilling to disclose their earnings for fear of visits by the taxman. Millions of elvers, baby eels only a couple of inches long, return to the rivers in huge shoals. They are preyed upon by gulls, herons and kingfishers, pike, perch and trout, even by larger members of their own kind, but most of all by man.With elvers fetching around pounds 60 a kilo, there's big money to be made. Fishing all night and seeing eels "swimming" through grass is perhaps the spookiest of all fishing experiences.However, at this time of year it's the returning eels that are targeted.

Some strange gene prompts all the eels to head seawards around the same time. They have an extraordinary ability to cross land as long as it's reasonably damp. A Hampshire bailiff who controls several miles of river tells me he earns more on the nights that the eels run downstream and off to the Sargasso Sea than he gets for a whole year of bailiffing. It was good money (certainly more than I earned as a junior reporter) but the job's prospects were unpromising, and it was scarcely an occupation to impress the girls.Sizeable eels can still earn good money. (I kept them in my mum's washing machine when she went to work.) For most of the summer, I would fish all night, often catching three or four 2lb eels.