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Cleaning your fish to the benefit of the system

Started by Wildfisher, December 29, 2006, 12:45:39 PM

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Wildfisher

Consider cleaning your fish  at the waterside and  returning  all the waste  parts. This returns at least some of the nutrients from the lost bio-mass. In North America, it has been proven that this provides an overall benefit to systems  in places  where commercially caught salmon offal is  returned  to rivers.

aliferste

This all makes sense, I wonder why so many lochs ask you to not clean your fish at the lochside ? Just to make the place look pretty ?

haresear

QuoteI wonder why so many lochs ask you to not clean your fish at the lochside ? Just to make the place look pretty ?

You got it Aliferste. Generally, "fisheries" have this rule. Otherwise the place would look ugly and lose a sense of naturality :lol:

Alex
Protect the edge.

Harpo

Hi folks,

I'm liking this new eating your catch part of the forum, which is one of the main reasons I fish to try and get the freshest fish I can...luckily for me I don't have to rely on what I catch to survive or I'd be very slim ! cooking a really fresh wild trout over the embers of a fire with some bay leaf and ground chilli was a real pleasure for me this summer.

Anyway, I thinks it's always a good idea to clean your fish as quickly as possible so as to not ruin the  eating qualities, doing this on the loch they were caught and putting something back feels right as well and something I try and do whenever possible, even when sea fishing.

Now I need to catch some trout and make myself a fish smoker !!

Cheers & hae a good new year when it comes

bluezulu

i think i've pretty much always done this without ever really thinking about whether it might be better for the loch or system i'm on..more because i often eat the few fish i kill there and then , and if i dn't then (probably incorrectly) i've always thought the fish would be 'fresher' when i cooked it that evening if it was cleaned as soon after its final fatal encounter with a solid object.

i did experiment with homemade smokers but confess i now use an abu. i actually still think trout taste best wrapped in newspaper,  soaked and cooked in the embers, but soemtimes making a fire is a bit of a palaver- especially when you'e traipsing around a series of lochs as i seem to mostly do on the few days hill loching i get these days.

drumgerry

Swithun - I know this to be the case with mackerel.  Lots of mackerel caught on the east coast of scotland this year (don't know about anywhere else) were infested with worms.  Reputedly these worms are harmful to humans if ingested (not that you'd want to eh?!!).  Killing and gutting the fish immediately is a precaution which works by not giving the worms the chance to migrate from the gut to the flesh.

Cheers

Gerry

charrcatcher

Quote from: drumgerry on December 31, 2006, 02:06:40 PMLots of mackerel caught on the east coast of scotland this year (don't know about anywhere else) were infested with worms.

Well that's true enough. I took an average of a box or sometimes two a week when we could get out and with on a very few exceptions those mackerel were the nastiest mess of writhing worms inside that I've ever seen, and I've gutted a fair few fish these last 50 years. They were wee things like fleshy hairs, some of them tightly coiled, and the numbers in most of the fish were beyond belief. Inside the body cavity, not just the guts themselves.

The inshore codling over here are often pretty wormy too, but nothing like this - it was like plague proportions. Mind you the crab boys didn't care much when they got them for bait.


Allan Crawford

I've been putting the guts back into the water it was caught from for years, take the trout home and wash then out much easier on cleaning the kitchen and better for Loch.

Also as Allan Liddle mentions, when a loch is over run with small fish I know of fly fishers who kill all the small ones and just throw them on the bank, instead they should be throwing the dead ones back into the loch. On local lochans near me on Skye which I might be the only one who fishes them once or twice a year I'm convinced this improves the average size of the trout.

Allan Crawford

.D.

Going to some loch that hardly ever gets fished, with a large population  of small trout, then killing all the little trout you catch that day ( and throwing the wasted bodies back) will have no real impact on the average size of the trout in that loch. You would be having no more impact (on the size of the fish population) than a passing fish-eating bird. It's just pissing in the wind.


The fish themselves don't benefit at all. They don't spend too much time thinking about how big they are.

:worms


Discuss :lol:.


.D.




Wildfisher

Quote from: .D. on May 18, 2008, 09:07:41 PM
They don't spend too much time thinking about how big they are.

probably only when being pursued by  one bigger than themselves................ :D 

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