You're not too far from the truth: in fact it's two different chapters from the same book, concatenated together into a single article. From what I can tell the

You're not too far from the truth: in fact it's two different chapters from the same book, concatenated together into a single article. From what I can tell the style of the book is to interleave these two different stories in alternating chapters: one, a natural history of the eel as a species; two, a personal memoir of the author's childhood fishing for eels with his father.