10-27-2009, 07:56 PM
Bleeding your fish is really important too if you want to keep the eggs to fish with, in steelhead and salmon for example. but I do it with every fish I keep. Avery's right, it always does produce a better fillet.
I do it just like I described in my previous post: cut through all the gill arches. The sooner you can do it the better - preferably immediately after unhooking it, before you even bonk it on the head. There is also a major artery down there that you can cut that works well too. It's a little hard to describe where it is, so the gill arches work fine. It especially helps if you hang the fish upside down as it bleeds and continually break loose the blood clots that form, so that it can bleed out completely.
Then, I get out the remaining blood in the tail section by jabbing a sharp knife through the lateral line @ the wrist of the tail (just below where your fillet would end), and hanging them tail down in a tree. This artery might be tough to hit sometimes, but you will know when you hit it because there should be a significant amount of blood (unless you were lucky enough to completely drain it all out from the gills).
PM me if you have any more questions so we don't hijack the thread.
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I do it just like I described in my previous post: cut through all the gill arches. The sooner you can do it the better - preferably immediately after unhooking it, before you even bonk it on the head. There is also a major artery down there that you can cut that works well too. It's a little hard to describe where it is, so the gill arches work fine. It especially helps if you hang the fish upside down as it bleeds and continually break loose the blood clots that form, so that it can bleed out completely.
Then, I get out the remaining blood in the tail section by jabbing a sharp knife through the lateral line @ the wrist of the tail (just below where your fillet would end), and hanging them tail down in a tree. This artery might be tough to hit sometimes, but you will know when you hit it because there should be a significant amount of blood (unless you were lucky enough to completely drain it all out from the gills).
PM me if you have any more questions so we don't hijack the thread.
[signature]