Massachusetts Kayak Fishing: How to Clean Your Bluefish Catch

Cut the fish open, just below gills, and remove the gills first. Then reach down into the stomach cavity and pull out everything you can get a grip on. This includes the stomach sack and digestive track, both of which are often that not filled with baitfish. The more thorough you are, the better your bluefish will taste when you cook it or smoke it, the longer your fish will keep during the next few hours in you kayak. Once you get home and fillet your catch, wrap each fillet in Saran wrap and place the fillets on the bottom shelf in the back of the refrigerator, where the coldest air tends to collect.

There are a couple of advantages, aside from maintaining good-quality fillets and preserving your fish, to bleeding, gutting and cleaning a bluefish while you're in the kayak. Cutting fillets from fish is widely-recognized as pretty wasteful ways. Unlike steaking, where you cut the fish vertically into thick steaks from the front of the tail to the gill plate, filleting leaves significant amounts of flehs along the spine and between the ribs.

The traditional way to deal with this kind of waste has been - in that classic cartoon cat's prized grab from the garbage can - has been to stick the leftover fish frame, head and all, into a big pot of water and boil it down to make fish stock or roue.

Unfortunately, bluefish frames don't render will into stock. The oils and fats in bluefish don't render well. So by cleaning and gutting your bluefish in the kayak, what you don't need, and would otherwise have to throw away at home, doesn't get wasted. Instead, it sinks to the bottom. On the way down they're picked at by other fishb like striped bass, herring, mackerel, etc. And once what's left over settles on the bottom, it's eaten by crabs and lobsters.

You're maintaining a link in the food chain this way. By cleaning your bluefish at sea, in your kayak, you're returning to the water column sustenance for other fish and shellfish that, in turn, provide sustenance to still other fish, migratory and not: striped bass, other bluefish, bluefin tuna, groundfish such cod, haddock, pollock, flounder and monkfish. Throw all that stuff overboard and you help sustain the waters you fish in.

There are a number of other goodr easons why gutting and cleaning a bluefish on the kayak is a good practice. Firs, the digestive enzymes in bluefish are quite strong and acidic, essentially caustic, to the forage it swallows. Leave those digestive enzymes inside your fish and the enzymes start to break down your catch. By removing the stomach, you remove the enzymes that can make cause your fish turn.

Second, the bloodstream, arteries and veins and capillaries of bluefish - like all fish - contain histamines. Histamines are a naturally occurring substance that, when released, begin to break down and speed the decomposition of fish. Bleed your bluefish, remove the gills and stomach, and you remove the histamines that will make it turn bad.

Third, blood contains oxygen, and if oxygen is not continually refreshed by the gills and heart, it oxidizes. Oxidation is nature's form of organi rust. And just as rust on car leads to body rot, so too does blood left in a bluefish lead to detioration. Blood in a bluefish is bad if your plan is to eat what you caught.

So if you're in the midst of a bluefish feeding frenzy, and you're landing fish almost as quickly fast as you can cast and retrieve them, pause every few minutes to at least cut the throat of the fish your bring on board. Cut way down to the spine to sever the main arteries.. Hold the fish upside down to bleed the fish. You'll prevent the oxidization which is a fish's first step in turning bad. You end up with fillets that taste good.

You can wait until later to do the rest: the removing the gills and stomach, the digestive track, the heart, liver and organs.

Well that's it for today's episode of Notes from a Local, your online audio and video resource for see kayakers and kayak fishermen around the world. I'm your host, Adam Bolonsky, podcasting and writing on the web from Twitter at sea kayak. Thanks for stopping by. And until next time, see ya 'round!