Pond Boss Forums INTRO New Forum Member Introduction Never been much for fishing, but maybe someday....

Some random fish cleaning pictures at our fish cleaning station. This is the way we fillet BG. This particular batch of 67 BG I did myself as the wife was away.

I'm sure there are other ways of doing it that retain more meat. But we have so many BG my other alternative to thinning them would be to throw them on the bank for the raccoons. So pulling out the best and leaving the rest for the raccoons seems a better alternative.

I'm no expert at this but am getting better. Before building our ponds I probably had cleaned no more than a couple dozen fish in my life previously.

Descriptions with pictures. Is the rat bait bucket clean? No but I have been feeding fish food to the fish out of it for two years so hopefully the poison is gone. The zip lock bag in it is clean though.

The glove is a necessary tool for me. I don't have Parkinsons but do have a genetic propensity to shake at times. Without the glove I would be bleeding more than the fish.

Carolynn rinses the meat again when it gets in the house, pulls out any missed pin bones, puts it back in the bag with fresh water and some milk, lets it soak overnight in the refrigerator, then spreads the fillets out on cookie sheets lined with butcher paper and freezes them. Then she takes the frozen fillets and either vacuum seals them or puts them in a zip lock bag and back in the freezer. This makes individual fillets that she can easily take out as few or as many as we need for any size meal. A little extra work but makes using the fillets for meal preparation very easy. Dredges and coats the frozen fillets and runs them through the air fryer. Delicious.

Edit: the yellow in the middle of the bag is one of the CC fillets from the small (maybe 3/4#) CC.