There’s always one, isn’t there, ready to spoil the fun:

Last night the finest conger cuddlers in the world should have
been gathering at the quayside to compete before a crowd of thousands.
Teams of firemen, powerboat racers, fishermen — all were preparing to
take their chances against the swinging eel in a tournament that raises
about £3,000 for the RNLI. This year, however, an anonymous animal
rights activist has scuppered the event after writing to the RNLI,
complaining that the event was “disrespectful” to dead animals and
threatening to film it and use the footage for a nationwide campaign
against conger cuddling.

Disrespectful to dead animals? What was this guy smoking? But what exactly is conger cuddling?

In the annual finale to the town’s Lifeboat Week, nine players or
“conger cuddlers”, would mount wooden blocks arrayed in a triangular
formation. An opposing team of nine would take turns to swing a dead
conger, suspended from a rope, and try to knock their opponents from
their perches as if they were human skittles, the crowd assisting with
carefully aimed buckets of sea water.

Hhhm. Where on earth could something like this have come from? Dorset is not usually known for such inventiveness.

For Richard Fox, 66, a retired publican, local historian, and former
world champion town crier, the demise of the sport he helped to found
is little short of tragic. “One person creates a fuss over a dead fish
and destroys the enjoyment of a large amount of people who do this
every year,” he said.

Mr Fox bestowed the game on a grateful town when he arrived
from Somerset, where farmhands play a game called mangel dangling — a
similar time-honoured sport involving a mangel-wurzel, a large root
vegetable. He sought to translate that tradition into Dorset fishing
culture. He told The Times: “The conger is an extremely slippery fish. The chaps try to grab hold of it to try to stay on their stand.”

Aha, that explains a lot. Very, errr, rural, are parts of Somerset and they do have to make their own fun.