Congrats. to you as you said, not being very experienced. Pretty cool to just walk up to a high fast moving river, and come away with a fish.

Yeah, congratulations. With the way the river has looked the last couple days, I would not have thought it. Good job!

Well done! Congrats on your prize!!

Thanks everyone! Water was definitely murky and high but in the few hours I was there it dropped at least a foot. I don't know if that will continue but I think I'll hit it again tomorrow am and hope for more luck!

was that you cleaning a fish under the footbridge around 11am or so? I was up there checking things out and saw someone cleaning what looked like a pretty bright jack across the way~ congrats!!

Haha yep that was me! Hopefully you didn't notice how armature I was cleaning the fish. I need to start catching more so I can get the cleaning part down and the filleting down. The dang thing tasted great for dinner but looked like someone gave a monkey a fillet knife and collected the scraps after the monkey sufficiently poked the fish.

PhilD~ I am usually not too critical of anyone who can catch a fish with the water conditions the way there were! At least you got some of it to take home for dinner! lol great job!

PhilD, Don't worry about your cleaning job....you're in good company! My wife baked up one of my earlier coho fillets tonight and couldn't resist making a comment about the condition of the fillet! Thanks a lot Honey! Took me about 8 Coho to start getting some confidence and not feel like I was hacking at it with a machete. Still not professional by any means, but at least not wasting meat and feel I could serve one to guests without having to blame the appearance on the "new guy at the fish market". :)

When cleaning and filleting a fish, you need 2 knifes: A heavy (bone cutting) knife and a very long extra sharp filleting knife. I'll not talk about the cleaning, most everyone knows how to do it. But here are the steps for an easy filleting:
1) With a diagonal cut, remove the head (try to save most of the meat on the upper side of the head, don't care to much for the belly side as it's very thin anyway).
2) With a vertical cut, remove the tail (barely cutting into the meat section, about 1/8 of an inch into the meat section).
3) With the fish laying on a filleting board, introduce the filleting knife touching the bones with the sharp side pointing to the upper side of the fish, above the thicker central section of the bones (the vertebra), from the head side, as deep as it'll go.
4) Start doing a back and forth movement, cutting the meat towards the skin and maintaining contact with the bones. Slowly cut it all the way to the tail.
5) Insert the knife, this time from the tail on the lower section of the fish and with the sharp side pointing to the lower side. Same movements, cut it all the way to the open belly.
6) Now that the skin is cut as close to the bones as it can go, starting from the head, slowly complete separating the meat from the bones. If you are careful enough, you can also separate the bones from the meat on the belly section.
7) Repeat steps 3 through 6 on the other side of the fish.

Spiegel: wow thats detailed, I'll try and follow that advice next time around. Thanks for the info!