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Found a new lake to fish today......
William81
Member Posts: 25,353 ✭✭✭✭
My Amish friend told me about a public lake hidden in conservation area not too far from my house....so today my son, a buddy and I headed over and checked it out. We caught several 12-14" bass and some Bluegills. No crappies, although we were told they get 14-15" ones from time to time....
The BG's/Sunfish were all decent sized...Not much fishing left for this year with hunting season getting up and going this week, but next spring I will be there !!
Comments
Heck yeah,,
nice day fishing and sometimes right under our nose
d
That appears to be a pumpkinseed, not a bluegill. Red slash on the gill cover and mottled scale pattern, plus small mouth. In the South, they are one of several species known collectively as "brim" which is a dialectic pronunciation of bream.
That'll be a fun place to take some youngsters!
Brim are great eating.
We call those "red ear", down south they call them "shell crackers". Good eating on the same level as bluegill.
I think redear/shellcracker have a larger mouth. But there is so much cross-breeding among sunfish that it could be almost anything.
Pan fish are very sweet to eat but I do hate filleting them! A tough job for a guy who has filleted thousands of fish in my day.
With "brim" it is far better, quicker, and easier to just scale, gut, and de-head. Then fry up whole. They don't have those annoying "pin" bones so there's just the spine and ribs to eat around. And the crispy fins are like fish potato chips.
I remember catching my first brim on a fly rod on the black river in SC That thing would have been a state record in Indiana. Then the person I was with butchered up the fish we caught trying to clean them. He was going to cook them with the head on..only gutted. I filet one and put it back in the water and it swam off.
Neighbor guts, scales, and de heads them, then into a pressure cooker, then into fishcake batter, in into a hot pan, then into the ole belly, yum yum.
A family of Amish in our area have found an interesting way to clean small panfish.....
My neighbor's lake has been over run with small bluegill. A major fish kill a few years back killed most of the crappies and bass in the lake. The last time I fished there I caught 25 three to four inch BG in about 50 casts...The Amish fishing next to me asked for anything I did not want to keep so I gave them all of them.
They had a couple buckets full and I commented they would be cleaning fish all night. One of the gentlemen told me
they gutted and cut off the heads and dropped them into an old hand crank washing machine and it removed the scales and then they cooked and canned them.....
They don't have freezers or fridges.......
I can assure you that pickled bluegill is superb, too. I used to pickle fish quite often and small panfish came out the best. For that use, I did fillet them to get bite-sized boneless chunks, but the pickling process would have dissolved any small bones anyway.
My late uncle used to pickle pike. The bones did dissolve, just like Rocky mentioned and boy that fish was delicious!