Filleting, deboning and cooking carp

Having fished carp for nearly two decades now, I can't tell you how many times I've been asked by onlookers whether or not I eat them, how they taste, etc. For the most part, I don't keep carp, let alone eat them. With the exception of some neighbors that occasionally ask for a carp, they are all released in good condition, especially the bigger ones.

I had tried baked carp, smoked carp, and carp soup many years ago, none of which were even close to being edible, at least by my palate's standards. Add the fact that they contain two sets of double y bones, they quickly turn into a nightmare for anyone that hates bones in fish as much as I do.

This season, I made it one of my goals to debone a carp, and find at least one way to cook it that would warrant at least a second bite, if not finish the entire portion (dare I say like it?).

During my first outing of the season to a waterway cleaner than where I fish around Montreal, I harvested a small carp in the 9 lbs range. After keeping it alive in cool water in my keepnet, I bled it out at the end of the day, and remove both fillets from the backbone.

Not too appealing so far, I then proceeded to remove the thick rib bones, after which I separated the fillet vertically along the lateral line. From the I skinned them, followed by trimming the reminder of boneless belly meat from behind the ribs. I then remove thin strips of flesh from around both side of the four sets of remaining y bones, yielding about 1 lb of boneless carp flesh.

After freezing it for a couple weeks, I decided to cook the carp on my outdoor log fire bbq. I thawed out the carp meat, trimmed off some of the remaining darker portions of fishier / unappealing flesh, and tried 2 recipes:

First came the thicker, fattier pieces of carp. Seasoned them in blackened seasoning, and barbecued them over a log fire. 

Cooked version wasn't as bad as I thought. The BBQ version with spice ended up similar color to steak, texture slightly softer/fattier. Fish aftertaste still there, but not as bad as I thought, being that I cooked it over log fire, with lot's of blackened spice. 

Next came the thinner parts. After dipping them into a beaten egg, I coated them in Italian style seasoned bread crumbs. I then fried them in oil over the fire until golden/brown. Basically an improvised schnitzel style with seasoned bread crumbs. Flesh was similar in color to veal schnitzel, maybe a touch darker. Texture was noticeably less fatty than the bbq version. Taste was also better than bbq version, and agreed upon by my son and his fiancee as well

Overall, both versions were edible, especially if one was really hungry. I may have actually finished a full serving of the fried carp / schnitzel version, but we were having burgers and assorted grilled sausages, which I much prefer, and the carp was just a test / entree. 

All in all, I'm glad to have finally turned a carp into something palatable. However, not a fish I'd harvest again for myself, simply too much waste, for flesh like likely has more pollutants than I'm used to ingesting from fish I typically harvest.

2018 fishing season highlights

Looks like it's about that time of the year again. Just about ready to stow away my fishing gear and get ready for the ice fishing season, which will likely arrive earlier than usual this year. As usual, I'll run through some of our season highlights in pics with narrative.

2018 was another fun and informative fishing season, although I was thrown more "curveballs" that I imagined. From losing spots due to construction and closures, to extreme weather conditions, this season put me to the test a bit more than what I'm usually used to.

As always in fishing, perseverance paid off, and the entire family as well as customers and friends landed some big fish.

Starting off with predatory species, as they embody sport fishing a bit more than bottom feeders, although I do enjoy them all equally...

Bass:

Largemouth bass were my target for this species, the vast majority of time chasing bass was in areas where they are the dominant species. The kids and I all landed some nice largies to kick off the bass fishing season, fishing the Quebec bass opener at Mijocama for the 16th season in a row.

I landed some nice largemouth both from shore, and from my new float tube as well.

While I didn't target smallmouth bass too much, I did manage to land a few quality smallies as well.

Northern Pike:

Spent a lot less time targeting Northern Pike this season, but on the few days that we did, the action was good.

 Some more trophies were landed during trips to to Mijocama, and then at Le Domaine Shannon in July:

Walleye:

Another neglected sport fish species this season, the 2 landed by Avi and I were incidental, while targeting pike.

When I finally did get around to targeting walleye late in the season with my friend Mark, I did just fine under his guidance.

Musky:

I normally don't target muskies much on my own. My friend Mike took most of the musky season off, and by the time I was set to get out with Patrick, he had sold his boat for the season. However, I did manage a couple smaller muskies while targeting other species.

My first musky came shortly after the season opener, I was targeting bass during one of my first ever float tube outings. Casting a buzzbait on a light rod, the musky put up a great fight, numerous jumps, and towed me around until I subdued it and landed it by hand.

Probably my most enjoyable catch of the season.

Carp:

This had to be one of my toughest overall season fishing for carp. The late start to spring, had them sort of lethargic until mid May. The extreme heat and lack of wind we experienced most of the summer was bad enough, but almost every group that I took out all season ended up booking on the worst possible days weather wise, extreme heat, with no wind and mirror like surface.

Still, we managed to save face and land some decent fish, but nowhere near the quality and numbers of seasons past. My 2018 carp picture gallery can be viewed by clicking:
http://www.freshwaterphil.com/carp-fishing-pictures.cfm

My 2 notable catches of the season, cam 2 days apart. My biggest carp landed in 2018 was 31 lbs.

Less than 48 hours later, I took my childhood friend and his kids out for some carp fishing, while they were visiting from NY. First fish of the day, was a stunning mirror carp, just a touch under 20 lbs.

I finally stumbled onto a new spot late in the season, plan to try it again during peak season next year.

Sturgeon:

Our windiest and coldest October destroyed most of my sturgeon fishing plans, with both Mark and Patrick trying to play catchup for the crazy amount of bookings they had to cancel due to weather. Luckily, I did manage a few hours fishing sturgeon with Mark in September, and landed a couple nice sturgeons.

Other freshwater species:

Managed some incidental channel catfish while chasing carp, nothing over 10 lbs though. Some decent perch, sunfish, and small trout as well.

Ice fishing:

I particularly enjoyed my 2018 ice fishing season, exploring more lakes than ever before, landing some nice pike..

Found some good jumbo perch spots, as well as some largemouth bass:

I spent a week in Hawaii, fishing the Pacific ocean for the first time ever. As guides for big game species were too expensive for my liking, I decided to do it all from the shore on my own. Extremely rewarding, and not a trip I'll forget any time soon, read more at: 

http://freshwater-phil.blogspot.com/2018/08/shore-fishing-adventure-in-kauai.html

And last but not least, my first season fishing out of my new float tube. Great way of combining a good workout on hot days with good fishing. Read about my outings at: 

http://freshwater-phil.blogspot.com/2018/06/canada-float-tube-fishing-season-1.html 

All in all, another memorable fishing season in the books. Thank you all for following my adventures online. Thank you to my customers for putting your confidence in me as your fishing guide. Thank you to my family (especially my lovely wife) for putting up with my fishing addiction. And most of all, thank you dear God, for giving me the ability to pursue my dreams.

Montreal Quebec fishing guides

The city of Montreal in the province of Quebec is surrounded by various waterways containing some of the biggest fish in the province, as well as good quantities of fish for most species. This allows various local fishing guides to offer some of the best fishing in the province of Quebec. While I only guide for carp (my specialty fish species), a few of my friends are fishing guides as well. Between them, they cover most of the guided fishing techniques and species anyone around Montreal or Southern Quebec can possibly want to try fishing for.

I'm lucky enough to fish the Montreal area with these guides quite often. There is nothing quite like targeting a given species of fish with fishing guides that are at the top of their game. Besides for having the best chances at landing trophy fish or simply huge numbers of fish, fishing with a guide is the best way to learn proper techniques and tactics related to targeting, catching and properly releasing big fish.

It isn't too often that I get the chance to challenge myself to a fishing marathon. This week, my schedule ended up lending itself to a gruelling challenge. On Monday evening, I headed out with my friend Patrick. He is by far the best sturgeon guide in the province of Quebec. I've caught some sturgeon over 50 lbs with him in the past, and no one I know consistently catches 50+ lbs fish on nearly every outing.

Avi came along for the outing, hoping to catch his first sturgeon. We got set up around 7:00 PM, a bit over an hour before sunset. Sturgeon typically tend to bite after dark in the summer, especially during the type of heat wave we've been having.

Though the outing was a bit on the slow side, we managed to land 5 sturgeon, up to 58 inches (about 55-60 lbs), between 9:30 PM and 2:30 AM. Avi landed his first sturgeon ever, a mid sized one at 42 inches.

After heading home and sleeping only 2 hours, I headed out bright and early for a guided carp fishing outing I was doing the next morning, with John, and his grandson Tameem. Both were new to carp fishing, as are most of my clients. As I always do, I started off by giving them a rough idea on how to hook and fight big carp, then explained and demonstrated my set up in detail.

Didn't take long to get our first hit, John landed this nice carp, another fatty:

A few minutes later, he caught another one, then his grandson Tameem finally got some as well:

Amazingly, the fishing stayed on all through the day. John and Tameem ended up landing 18 carp of 22 runs, with 2 of the lost ones due to line cuts. Probably one of the highest landing percentages I've ever guided. They broke another record, landing 3 double headers during the outing, just missing a 4th one do to a line cut, and missing a triple header by about 30-60 seconds. Truly amazing when you consider that we were only allowed to use 3 rods!

Needless to say, I was exhausted by days end, after running around in the sun all day on only 2 hours of sleep. That being said, I couldn't have been happier with the fishing results, and slept real well that night.

After catching up on some sleep and a backlog of work at the office, I headed out again, this time with my childhood friend Jimmy, who also happens to be one of the top bass / pike guides in the Montreal and Southern Quebec region. Plan was to fish the Lac St Louis portion of the St Lawrence River bordering Montreal. The high winds made it impossible to finesse for for smallmouth bass, so we changed plans and decided to drift fish for pike, casting spinnerbaits and burning them over the tops of weed clumps in shallow water. The fishing tactic worked like a charm, I hooked a nice pike on my third cast. The bite stayed on, although a bit sporadic, until we marked a couple waypoints into the GPs to get a better idea of where we needed to be drift fishing. It was then that we started hooking into pike on almost every drift. No huge ones, most being in the 3.5 to 5 lbs range.

The 30 km/h+ wind gusts eventually forced us to seek shelter in some shallow marshy area. Though the wind was still strong, the waves weren't. Fishing the marsh area was tough, fish weren't around. Again, Jimmy;s experience as a bass fisherman came through.He pulled out a push pole and maneuvered his big bass boat into some of the thickest slop, a mix of heavy weed, lily pads and grass. I tied on a weedless frog. Jimmy called a cast, and my first drop, I hooked a nice lunker sized largemouth bass. It was well hooked, so I managed to horse it through the thick cover, and landed it shortly after.

I was more than thrilled to see a largemouth bass that size come out of the Lac St Louis section of the St Lawrence river, as they are somewhat rare there, being largely outnumbered by pike and smallmouth bass. That being said, the slop we were fishing in was prime largemouth bass territory, so the fish was exatcly where it should have been, just as Jimmy predicted.

After fishing the slop for a couple hours, the wind started dying down. We headed back to our originalk area to drift fish in the wind and waves. The pike were on fire, we ended up landing over 35 pike, not counting the ones we lost. 

Surprise catches often happen when fishing, and this outing was the jackpot. One one of our pike drifts, I hooked into a mid size smallmouth bass. Jimmy was somewhat surprised, as he rarely sees any bass at all in the pike infested area we were fishing. A few casts later, I hooked into another smallmouth bass. Jimmy's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when he saw the size of the bass on it's fist couple jumps. Being used to bigger fish like carp, I didn't think the bass was that big, but when I finally managed to land it, I realized that it was by far the biggest bass I ever landed on the LAc St Louis portion of the St Lawrence river. It measured 21 inches,and weighed in at a whopping 5 lbs.

In his days fishing the Montreal area, Jimmy has never seen a smallmouth bass that size come out of Lac St Louis. Even most local tournament lunkers usually don't exceed 4 lbs, and their are no shortage of bass tournaments fished their almost every week throughout the summer. As happy as I was with my catch, Jimmy seemed even more excited about it than I did.

Both the largemouth and smallmouth bass I landed were the first ones since early summer, as I rarely devote any time to bass fishing any more.  Needless to say, I was thrilled with the quality of the fishing Jimmy put me onto despite the high winds that kept most fishermen off the water on that day. 

Headed out again early the following week, this time to chase trophy muskies with my friend and number one musky guide, "Musky" Mike. When it comes to fishing for big muskies in SouthWest Quebec, Mike is the man for the job. Mike has caught many trophy sized muskies on the St Lawrence and Ottawa River, namely LAc St Louis, St Francois, Lake of Two Mountains and more. Having all that experience is invaluable, not to mention a top quality new Lund every season packed with all the latest electronics, including a priceless chip containing all his good musky waypoints to hit each time we fish together.

Fishing musky with a top notch musky guide like Mike, I always have a sense of confidence that's it's only a matter of time until we hook up to a nice big fish, even though many others have a terribly hard time catching muskies. Again, you can't beat fishing with the best fishing guides at the top of their game.

Though this particular outing was quite short, we managed to hook 3 musky, I landed 2 of them, the third spitting the lure as soon as I started reeling in the line. As usual, I'm quite sure it was the biggest one of the day. The ones that get away before you see them always are, but this one was peeling a tightly set drag at seriously high speed.

Either way, I was still happy with my outing, getting another nice pic for my collection as usual, always love the markings on South West Quebec muskies, especially when they come out of clear water:

Whether you live in Quebec, or possibly visiting the Montreal, your best bet for some good fishing is to go out with a guide that can show you how it's done properly, and put you onto large numbers of big fish. For more information on local fishing guides and their daily rates, click: 

http://freshwaterphil.com/fishing-guides.cfm