Jeff asks: ""Bill, thanks for the reply. Care to share your technique? Maybe it's been posted before?""
This video for filleting fish is pretty good. It shows two versions of filleting - regular knife and electric knife. I basically use the regular knife method the charter captain uses. A couple notes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hkt3Q5y84UA really sharp knife makes filleting look and be easy. Cutting the pin bones away from the top of the rib cage especially on larger fish of most all species will quickly dull the tip section of the fillet knife. Be prepared to resharpen your knife if you are cleaning numerous fish. Catfish do not have pin bones. The pin bones connect the fish's lateral line to the backbone allowing the fish to easily sense small vibrations in the water.
Note 1 - Notice there is a little more meat waste using the electric knife perch demo compared to the final fillet of perch with the regular knife. It is fairly tricky to cleanly remove a very thin layer of the rib cage especially if you are in a hurry cleaning lots of fish.
Note2 - For walleye from ponds and smaller lakes, you do not need to remove any red meat since Walleye from smaller waters have little if any red meat on the skin side of the fillet. For most all filleted fish, I always remove the pin bones but do not "zipper" the whole fillet as in the video for the walleye, IMO this full fillet length zippering is only needed for big lake WE. On most all fish including big lake walleye, basically all of the pin bone row stops at the end of the rib cage. I only cut a thin strip containing the pin bones from just above the rib cage.
Note3 - to hold the tail of the fillet to remove the skin I use a table fork to hold the tail tip of the fillet as I slice off the skin. My finger and nails are not the best for holding the small slippery tail tip of the fillet as the skin is sliced away.
