Planning a pond hop day for ice out pickerel.i have caught monsterz this time of year with little crappie shiners pinheads..thats the plan.nothing better than pickerel ice cold spring water....praying i choose the right spot....freezer basically empty...wish us luck.

...fish up on belly,start at the end of the dorsal fin,cut straight down to the backbone.turn knife horizontal.cut to tail ,now all y bones are exposed,cut on the outside of those bones.(it will be aproximately half thickness of a standard fillet.the last third ,tail section no bones.if done correctly you end up with 5 pieces.tough to explain.i hope we get a big one tomorrow and ill video...i have zero luck uploading video,...we will see.now is the time to harvest pickerel...so delicous....maybe a diagram is in order..hmmm.

That was just plain awesome, thanks for taking the time to draw that up. I get the gist of what you’re saying.

Went to Fischers meadows in Avon.1 13" bass,1 10" perch and a world record dace...3.5 lbs or more.shouldve took a pic of the damn ugly thing.got 4 fillets,back out tomorrow,scrape out a few more for a fish fry.

Cool pics

Do you ever make pickerel fish cakes? Thats how we used to do it. We would gut them and bake them in the oven for about 10 mins or however long it took to crisp the skin up some so it was easy to pull off.

Once that time was up we would peel the skin, cut the head and tail off (if we didn't do that off the bat) and run the entire fish through an hold table mounted grinder - bones and all. We would do that a few times and use it to make cakes.

We tried to only use bigger fish so you could grab the backbone and pull out most of it - but whatever didn't come up got ground up.

definitely very good to eat. Never tried to fillet them like you are describing but I might have to give that a try. Thanks for the diagrams and descriptions

Once it's heated up it does

Yep,fishcakes,done it,boxed mashed potatoe mix,any flavor works great.cornmeal or flour coating,eggs, milk.

...had to work for them...17' down under a balsa slip and 1/2 a crawler ...tail hanging.fish were ice cold.brrr,nice day though,finally.

Wow nice fat White Perch!