[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Bluegills (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 5/29/2011 3:08:59 AM EDT
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With the bad weather this spring, there has not been much opportunity for fishing.
My nephew calls the other night: "Wanna go to a farm pond after work"? "Sure. I'll be by your house about 7:30. I'll bring coffee" So, a carton of red worms, an old Mitchell 308 on an ultralight fiberglass rod, 4lb test mono, and a few hours of spare time... 
Now we have enough for a small fish fry, plus some cut bait and chum for the river if it ever stops raining... |
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Good start on a dinner pic thread...need to see some after shots Those things are good eating  they sure are! back when i was a kid my cousin and i would hang out at my grandparent's house in the summer and go fishing in their neighbor's pond. it was stocked with a ton of bluegill and crappie. batter the filets up in a little zatarains and fry 'em up! |
Seriously. |
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There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill.  I completely agree. I never understood why more people don't say this. Maybe because it's a lot of work for those filets? Walley and crappie, northern too are good eating. Hell, catfish is good too. |
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You are rich!
About a month ago I was in a Meijers and they had Canadian bluegill on sale for $15.99 a pound. Good catch and congrats on the Mitchell reel. I have a couple from the late 60's. My rod is set up about the same as yours. I occasionally feed the gills off my dock, mostly small little guys. Occasionally a bass comes along and eats one of the small gills while I'm tossing the bread to them. |
I love fishing, although I don't get to do it much anymore. I was fishing before I could walk good in Key West where I was born. I shocked my husband with my cast netting and fishing skills when we lived in Melbourne. Salt water fishing is my favorite cause you never know what you are going to pull up on your line. I wish we had an ocean here in TN because I'd be fishing every day. 
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Latex/Nitrile gloves?????? To hold a fish????  At $4.99 a box at HF? Sure. Painting, gutting fish, cleaning the grill, changing oil... Keep a box in the garage and the Ford... 
LOL, I keep BOXES of nitrile gloves around too, just never used them for fooling with fish. I skin a lot of furbearers.
As far as eating, panfish have always been my favorite! Since we are now inundated with snakeheads, I've found them to be a light meat, close to walleye. Coat with my seasonings and deep fry! Just need to watch out for eustronglyides (same as in yellow perch) in tidal water. Bigger fish/thicker filets, I butterfly and hold up to the sun to see what lurks within.... |
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[/quote] LOL, I keep BOXES of nitrile gloves around too, just never used them for fooling with fish. I skin a lot of furbearers.
As far as eating, panfish have always been my favorite! Since we are now inundated with snakeheads, I've found them to be a light meat, close to walleye. Coat with my seasonings and deep fry! Just need to watch out for eustronglyides (same as in yellow perch) in tidal water. Bigger fish/thicker filets, I butterfly and hold up to the sun to see what lurks within....[/quote] Won't deep frying kill any extra protien lurking in the fillet??? |
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All the time I spent fishing as a kid, I cant ever remember a time eating bluegill..... You don't know what you've missed. 
I love Bluegill.
I used to catch them, but dad alwasy throw em back, so I did... IIRC we used to keep large and small mouth bass, perch, pike and walley, trout and catfish. Ocean fishing was moslty pergie, flounder and rock bass or blackbass. |
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There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill. I will eat those until I'm in pain.  That's not that much - there's a bone in every second bite
A fish fry of bream is one of those memories of 30 years ago. Dipped in cornmeal,fried crisp and eaten with a loaf of bread...to unstick the bones! |
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No, I became a woman. Now I fish from a boat with a hundreds of dollars of tackle and drink beer. It's not nearly as much fun.
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A couple of times when I was a girl, I went to visit relatives who kept a boat on Lake Lanier outside Atlanta. Cane poles, dough balls, bluegills, Delaware Fruit Punch: life was good. Jane You became a boy?
Jane |
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Bluegill on a light fly rod . . . little rubber legged spiders as bait . . . now, that's some fishing fun. BTW, I believe the plural is just bluegill, not bluegills . . . not that it matters, but bluegills sounds funny to me. Good times, especially when you hear them sluuuurrrp! it up. |
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Quoted: Quoted: No, I became a woman. Now I fish from a boat with a hundreds of dollars of tackle and drink beer. It's not nearly as much fun.Quoted: A couple of times when I was a girl, I went to visit relatives who kept a boat on Lake Lanier outside Atlanta. Cane poles, dough balls, bluegills, Delaware Fruit Punch: life was good. Jane You became a boy? Jane no it never is. My nephew is 6 and niece is 3 and it's fun watching them fish. I know they have a lot of fun. |
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There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill. Quoted:
All the time I spent fishing as a kid, I cant ever remember a time eating bluegill..... Not all sunfish are great eating in all geographical locations. I think people also misidentify sunfishes which is easy to do since the coloration can vary from one location to another within the same species. Where I grew up in Canada, we had lots of Pumpkinseed Sunfish (picture below), Green Sunfish, Rock Bass and Bluegill. None of them were good eating. The flesh itself had an off taste. Everyone always threw them back. So much so that there were always tons of them around. Sometimes they would congregate in schools of 200+ fish. But we also had Crappie which are delicious. 
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No, I became a woman. Now I fish from a boat with a hundreds of dollars of tackle and drink beer. It's not nearly as much fun.
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A couple of times when I was a girl, I went to visit relatives who kept a boat on Lake Lanier outside Atlanta. Cane poles, dough balls, bluegills, Delaware Fruit Punch: life was good. Jane You became a boy?
Jane I've been fishing once as an adult. I caught 2 striped bass that were 39" and 41" long and everyone on the boat was whooping it up what great fish they were.Other than a tired arm,I didn't get anything from it - there was no challenge and no skill at all involved. Trolling back and forth and then winching them in with a giant reel is not nearly as much fun as when I was a kid,fishing with a cane pole,bobber and worms I dug myself or even when I seriously upgraded to a Zebco 202. I've never been again because there wasn't anything enjoyable about it. It was akin to *fishing* to me as running over a squirrel with the car vs popping one with a single shot .22 is "hunting". |
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Now I fish from a boat with a hundreds of dollars of tackle and drink beer. It's not nearly as much fun. Jane Yep... funny how that works. Sort of like, when you're a kid, you cast as FAR as you can, dreaming of the day when you'll own a boat. Years pass, you grow up, get a job, settle down and get married, and you FINALLY buy a boat, and then spend all your time casting towards shore.
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Must be a city boy
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when you're a kid, you cast as FAR as you can, dreaming of the day when you'll own a boat. Years pass, you grow up, get a job, settle down and get married, and you FINALLY buy a boat, and then spend all your time casting towards shore. How true, how true. 
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There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill. I will eat those until I'm in pain. That's not that much - there's a bone in every second bite
A fish fry of bream is one of those memories of 30 years ago. Dipped in cornmeal,fried crisp and eaten with a loaf of bread...to unstick the bones! We'd always skin them and fry them, then when they were properly done, you could use your fork to flick a big (triangle-shaped) bite of meat off each side. No bones, white on one side, fried brown on the other, a dash of hot sauce and lemon juice.......oh, man, I'm getting hungry.
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Not all sunfish are great eating in all geographical locations. I think people also misidentify sunfishes which is easy to do since the coloration can vary from one location to another within the same species. Weird. We'd catch most of ours (sometimes from the bank, sometimes in a boat) off rock bluffs in a nearby lake (Pickwick, on the TN river) in the summer. Those bluffs often dropped to 20' or more of water, and on a good day, you'd find a concentration of bluegill and the hardest thing was getting your bait down deep to the big fish before the little ones ate it. There was also the occassional late-spawning catfish to make things more interesting. 5# catfish on ultralight spinning gear is loads of fun. 
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Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill. I will eat those until I'm in pain. That's not that much - there's a bone in every second bite A fish fry of bream is one of those memories of 30 years ago. Dipped in cornmeal,fried crisp and eaten with a loaf of bread...to unstick the bones! We'd always skin them and fry them, then when they were properly done, you could use your fork to flick a big (triangle-shaped) bite of meat off each side. No bones, white on one side, fried brown on the other, a dash of hot sauce and lemon juice.......oh, man, I'm getting hungry. This man knows how it's done. We tried filleting them, but it's just easier and quicker to scale them, then cut the head off and pull the gut out. I'm getting hungry. It's been almost a year since with fried up some bream. |
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We called them bream in NC. The biggest ones are in the deeps of the farm pond and a cricket sunk to the bottom behind 12" of line and a split shot is murder on the dark purple, plate sized ones. You spent your day well! Same here in Louisiana. Of course, we call white perch (aka crappie) sac-au-lait. French for bag of milk, due to their white bellies. I like both bream and sac-au-lait, but to me sac-au-lait tastes a bit better. They also tend to get huge. LC |
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There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill. Quoted:
All the time I spent fishing as a kid, I cant ever remember a time eating bluegill..... Not all sunfish are great eating in all geographical locations. I think people also misidentify sunfishes which is easy to do since the coloration can vary from one location to another within the same species. Where I grew up in Canada, we had lots of Pumpkinseed Sunfish (picture below), Green Sunfish, Rock Bass and Bluegill. None of them were good eating. The flesh itself had an off taste. Everyone always threw them back. So much so that there were always tons of them around. Sometimes they would congregate in schools of 200+ fish. But we also had Crappie which are delicious. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j33/C-4C/pumpkin.jpg I can remember catching those pumpkinseed sunfish and bluegill. I grew up in CT. We fished alot when I was a kid. When we moved out here to OK, I had people would tell me they caught perch, but threw them on the bank. I told them they were crazy, perch was good eating. They gave me a look. Till I found out what okies call perch, is a blugill....crazy...
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Quoted: Quoted: We called them bream in NC. The biggest ones are in the deeps of the farm pond and a cricket sunk to the bottom behind 12" of line and a split shot is murder on the dark purple, plate sized ones. You spent your day well! Same here in Louisiana. Of course, we call white perch (aka crappie) sac-au-lait. French for bag of milk, due to their white bellies. I like both bream and sac-au-lait, but to me sac-au-lait tastes a bit better. They also tend to get huge. LC Crappie are "speckeled perch" here. The only people here who call them "crAH-ppie" are the guys who spend much more time watching fishing shows than actually fishing. Those pumpkinseed whatchamacallems are know as "shellcrackers" here, and they are bream get thrown into the same hot grease.
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There's no fish that tatstes better fried than a bluegill. Quoted:
All the time I spent fishing as a kid, I cant ever remember a time eating bluegill..... Not all sunfish are great eating in all geographical locations. I think people also misidentify sunfishes which is easy to do since the coloration can vary from one location to another within the same species. Where I grew up in Canada, we had lots of Pumpkinseed Sunfish (picture below), Green Sunfish, Rock Bass and Bluegill. None of them were good eating. The flesh itself had an off taste. Everyone always threw them back. So much so that there were always tons of them around. Sometimes they would congregate in schools of 200+ fish. But we also had Crappie which are delicious. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j33/C-4C/pumpkin.jpg That's strange, every sunfish I've tried has been great... pumpkinseed, bluegill, crappie, largemouth bass, rock bass... love 'em all. |
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I would consider the fish in the OP to be a Crappie, but classifying Sunfish is pretty subjective. The fish farther down the page is a classic Bluegill. Nah, first one is a classic Bluegill, not a Crappie. Second one is definite Pumpkinseed. Like you said, sunfish are subjective but those both look like classic examples of each "type." |
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The first time I ever ate a fish I caught was bluegill. I must have been 5. I caught it and my neigbor filleted it right there on the dock. My mom grilled it and brought it back. The fish was still moving and i could see the heart beat. Man, was that some good fish. |