Thread: Find the Crappie in this Catfish pile.

I'd love to eat a mess of them forkytails but cleaning crappie has just ruined me. I'd hate to have to skin 'em all by hand.:rolleyes: Nice catch fellas.

Originally Posted by gabowman

I'd love to eat a mess of them forkytails but cleaning crappie has just ruined me. I'd hate to have to skin 'em all by hand.:rolleyes: Nice catch fellas.

I use my fillet knife to clean cats, just like I do on the crappie. They come out pretty clean.

THere's a good post on the Bream forum here with some videos of people cleaning cats and panfish in under a minute (2 per minute for the panfish) without skinning or scaling them...

There is no need to skin cats when you have an electric fillet knife. Just fillet them like you would a crappie. It sounds mean, but I always take a hammer to there head before I fillet them also. One good whack will usually kill them. You'll know they are dead because they'll twitch a little and then nothing. It makes the job a lot cleaner and safer, especially with that electric knife.

I wonder if you got really good with a normal filet knife (like the fish mongers) I wonder how fast you could clean a mess of fish. Its my goal to be that good someday.

I don't know but it'd be pretty cool. I can't ever keep a normal fillet knife sharp though. I guess I'm unwilling to spend the money on a good knife.

Yeah if I was ever so inclined to really try to get good at it, I guess I would buy a knife that is fairly expensive and a sharpener. The only problem is that I need to start catching more fish to practice on.

The electric fillet knife is hard to beat. The manual one has to be too sharp to do the job for me. My granddad could keep a knife sharp enough, but I didn't get the hang of sharping knives that good.