Northwest Fishing Reports

Filleting small trout has been a pain for me. The trout is not exactly my favorite fish to eat and I have been spending far too much time trying to not waste anything. They all end up in the smoker a few times a year, and the biggest annual trout effort for my household is just about to happen. For the last several years, my wife has actually taken over the trout cleaning duties. She says because she's Japanese, she can do it better.... something to do with a notion roughly translated from Japanese to English as "muscle memory?"

With the first few trout coming in over the last few weeks, I felt rusty enough to watch some youtube how to videos. We watched a bunch of different videos... then eventually came across a video from a resort employee that made one swipe on each side of the fish from head to tail and slid a pretty nice boneless filet off of each side of the fish. less than 10 seconds per side. Ive been taking 10 minutes per fish. I may have been getting a little more meat off of the trout than he was, but not really that much.

Tonight was my second attempt at 1 pass fillets. These pictured fillets took less than 10 seconds each. The first time was total butchery. (no pics of that) Wasted 1/2 of the fish. Tonight I am pretty happy with what I came up with. I realize these are not perfect, but I actually weighed the waste vs fillets. I dont think the meat I wasted is worth extra effort. I'm sure I'll get flamed here, but what do you think?

My waste pile was 1 pound 4 oz The finished fillet pile was 1 pound 2 oz. These 4 little trout were 2 pounds 7 oz collectively in the bag as they came out of the livewell.

Blast away!........

I fillet all my trout, but those in Roosevelt are much larger which also makes it much easier to do. I find a very sharp, flexible fillet knife to be indispensable.

Curious how you deal with the pin bones...

I eat em, on these little trout. Salmon and larger trout, I tweezer them out. Anyone else know what your filet vs waste percentage is?

Those are Lake 12 stockers?
Pretty nice looking meat. (-:

Lake Meridian this time. Was trying holdover targeting methods in all of the similarly sized nearby lakes I could this last week. Only two larger fish I caught all week came from Morton at 15", Could have been larger stockers or holdovers? Oh well, we're on our way to the Lake Wilderness derby Now! Just about out the door @ 230 am... Wish us luck!

Processing plants can average around 60% yield when hand filleted and trimmed up to look nice keep in mind this is production setting. A skilled filleter at home might be able to save a bit more off the carcass

Thats the kind of info I was after. Thanks RiverD!

I'll try filleting and weighing both ways this time to see how much meat % im wasting. Ive bled my fish and thrown them in the fridge, but still haven't cleaned them from yesterday.

Yep, bleeding 'em as you catch 'em makes for best table fare.