Scrubby pad
Dry rag
Wet rag rinsed out and wrung dry
Scotch brite pads work INSANELY well
Also if your ice melted and you were at the water already. Adding bubble weed to your eel bucket helps keep them cooler and moist. Also if your eel bucket has drain holes you can just drunk your whole eel bucket, and then locate it up high and dry and it will help with the eel slime. Combine the dunking of your whole bucket to rinse and cool them with a few pieces of bubble weed and you should be good to go. Good luck catch em up!
Instead if throwing away empty Gatorade bottles or water bottles. Rinse them and freeze them. And just toss that in with your eels. Depending how many eels you are using you can freeze single bottles of water or gallon sizes and add them. To keep the eels cool.
If you're having that much of a hard time hooking them. Try rigged eels easier to hook and maintain since they are not alive. May prove easier for the gf to handle as well until you can get your "methods" perfected to transport, keep alive, and hook your snakes. If rigging floss and needles and thread isn't your thing, look at a quick and dirty method of rigging them using zip ties
Remember you can go fishing alone or you can take someone fishing. When you take someone fishing it's about all attention on them to make sure they have what they need. You're sharing something that is important to you. You don't want to make it a chore, they'll not want to be a part of.
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