01-19-2015, 04:33 AM
[quote gmwahl]So I took my girls up to Montpelier reservoir yesterday and today for some perch fishing and it was about as fast as I could get a line down a hole it was being hit. What a Dilema, huh?
Thing is, I'm a believer in if you are getting tons of dinks then the herd needs to be thinned and as Idaho has no limit on perch we kept everything that came to the top. The perch averaged 6-9". Hopefully if more people keep a ton of them the size will get bigger.
So.... What do y'all do with the dinks if you keep them? I made chowder tonight after spending an hour and a half filleting the buggers and it was really good, but any other ideas to use them without wasting them?[/quote]
I think it depends on how good you are at cleaning fish. An electric fillet knife sure helps but might make cleaning really small fish harder. I don't know.
I have kept some pretty small perch when there were gobs of them and nothing else... man are they tasty! but you kind of feel weird cleaning such small fish and it is quite a bit of effort for very little actual meat.
I think anything less than 5-6 inches is probably too small there is a point where they just don't have the backbone to allow for you to clean all of them successfully. You'll mess up half of them. If that happens, take note of the size and try to keep them an inch or two bigger.
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Thing is, I'm a believer in if you are getting tons of dinks then the herd needs to be thinned and as Idaho has no limit on perch we kept everything that came to the top. The perch averaged 6-9". Hopefully if more people keep a ton of them the size will get bigger.
So.... What do y'all do with the dinks if you keep them? I made chowder tonight after spending an hour and a half filleting the buggers and it was really good, but any other ideas to use them without wasting them?[/quote]
I think it depends on how good you are at cleaning fish. An electric fillet knife sure helps but might make cleaning really small fish harder. I don't know.
I have kept some pretty small perch when there were gobs of them and nothing else... man are they tasty! but you kind of feel weird cleaning such small fish and it is quite a bit of effort for very little actual meat.
I think anything less than 5-6 inches is probably too small there is a point where they just don't have the backbone to allow for you to clean all of them successfully. You'll mess up half of them. If that happens, take note of the size and try to keep them an inch or two bigger.
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