Can You Properly Clean And Fillet Your Fish?

In this article I intend to give you a quick lay down on cleaning and filleting your fish. We will first start with cleaning and then move to filleting.
Okay so now you have caught your dream fish and you want to learn how to clean it. You caught the biggest fish out of you and your buddies but for your efforts you now have to learn to clean it. Of course if you take it home you’re going to get fish scales and guts all over the place so maybe you should just clean it where you caught it.
First thing you’re going to need is a good filleting knife. You’re going to have to spread out some newspaper. Then you’re going to want to use a knife of fish scaler. Go ahead and scrape against the grains until all the scales are removed. Now you can wrap the newspaper and toss it out. You can also rinse the fish at this point.
So now you want to put down more newspaper and get prepared for the bigger mess. Time to gut the fish. So take your knife with the blade pointed towards the fishes head, poke the stomach and slit the fish moving the fillet knife towards the fished head. Make sure you don’t cut too deep. Now take the filleting knife and point it toward the fish tail and open the stomach. Now you can remove all the guts.
Your almost there. All that’s left to do is remove the gills. Once this is done you can wrap up the messy newspaper and you have a perfectly cleaned fish.
Now it’s time to learn to fillet your fish. I’m warning you though not to get too good at it because once you turn into a pro everyone is going to try and get you to fillet their fish.
First thing you’re going to need is a good knife and a cutting board to lay the fish on. You have to cut the head off. To do this you want to cut it off right to the rear of the gills.
Now you are going to hold the fish by the tail, take the knife with the blade pointing away from your body and toward where the head was. Now you will slice the body of the fish crosswise. You can use the back bone for a guide to direct the knife through.
Lastly take one half of the sliced fish and place the fish piece flesh side up. Hold the fish by the tail, place the knife between the skin and the flesh and run the knife down the length of the fish piece to remove the skin cutting in the direction of the tail to the head area. There you have it a perfectly filleted fish.
The old saying practice makes perfect certainly holds true in the case of cleaning and filleting fish. There is no better feeling than eating a fish that you caught, cleaned and cooked. So remember that no matter what a bad day of fishing is always better than a good day at work.
Dale Mazurek
Dale is a self taught professional fisherman with numerous articles written on the subject. You can check all these articles out at http://fishingtutor.blogspot.com/ you can also check out two more of his very popular blogs at http://relationshiptidbits.blogspot.com/ and http://creditneeds.blogspot.com/