I tend to fish late afternoon, early evening and I'm usually too knackered to filet my catches when I come home. I iki and bleed them right after catching them but then they sit in salt ice overnight until I scale them and filet them the next day. (Not removing the guts)

I saw a video showing how to filet snappers without piercing the "gut pocket" so since then I never bothered gutting my snappers and kahawais. The snappers taste ok but the kahawai have a very fishy taste I'm not a fan of. Is it because I'm not removing the gut? Or is it more likely I'm doing a bad job at bleeding them? I'm always surprised by how little blood comes out, maybe a shot glass worth, no more.

Mmmm   a fishy smelling Kahawai .......so  how long did you leave that  before  processing . Sounds  dumb but fresh fish doesnt smell like fish , needs a few days  on ice before it gets smelly , or  not  bled and left in the sun  ( people do it  )  will see it  reclassified as fit for berley mincer  in about an hour

 The decomp starts as soon as the fish is dead and the enzymes  dont stay in the gut cavity when the fish is dead so the sooner the better .

I like my catch to be  bled and iced  within minutes of being landed  and jf you do that  they will be ok the next day , but personally I dont like to let the job drag for another day 

 Hell , me and the Mrs  could arrive home after a days fishing  , at 6-7pm . by the time the boat had been sorted  and the fish processed  it could be knockin on midnight , hands aching and freezing .......and I dont like filleting bent fish  but its hard to get them to lie straight in the chilly bin whilst in their death throes 

 

I caught a limit of snapper out Rags and got home on dusk and dinner was ready. Mates and I had been debating what technic works best so tried an experiment. Filleted some fish and put fillets in fridge straight away. Gutted and kept on ice some. Left some in filleting bench with a board on to stop cats pulling out during the night.

About 9 am filleted the rest. Chilled fish from Ivey bin were cold but nicer to fillet. Sink fish warm were more mushy to fillet and a bit wiffy. 

Serviced a piece of fillet from each that night to 6 people including a professional cook. And none of the people could pick the difference in taste or anyway. Including me. 

Since then I fillet as soon as possible for ease of filleting but I don’t sweat it if I have to leave overnight or for a while.  

Don’t believe me, I don’t believe what I’m told by others till I try myself. Give the experiment a try.

Just a note - I tried smoking Kawahai with brown sugar alone, with salt alone, combined and without anything . Turns out brown sugar with light amount of salt combined is best.  Who would have thought 😁

2 places I buy from are Manukau mall seafoods and a little shop in Otahuhu,princess st by lights I think it is,one  is leigh fisheries and the other a mix of Sanford/Moana

Even whole fish are fine,guts in. Price not unreasonable.

I iki all my fish then in the bin they go. Someone (McTool?)  mentioned bent fish. If they are ikied well they die straight away and as long as your bin is big enough it's relatively easy to keep them straight.

I use a slurry of water and ice, not too much water, just enough. Once home we generally drain the water out and put more ice in the bin with the chilly bin drain left open. I don't use water overnight as the fish get quite slimy and there will be lots of greeblies floating about. We don't usually gut our fish but we do for tuna. 

Fish treated this way are so much easier o fillet and snapper especially taste better after a day or two. While kahawai doesn't store well it is still perfectly good the next couple of days when treated like this.

We take icing our fish pretty seriously. I take 2 x 90l bins out fishing if were targeting snapper for three of us. We fill half fill those bins with ice and as we catch fish in they go. Kahawai get left a couple of minutes in the tuna tube to bleed out before they go in the bin. We cover the fish with ice and add some sea water once there are a few in there.

We go through a lot of ice but I have an ice maker so it's not expensive. It helps having a couple of decent sized freezers to keep it all in. At the moment i think I have four 20L bags of ice ready to go but this time of year if I'm gurnard fishing I don't use so much ice. Most of the people I fish with on their boats use maybe only a couple of 5kg bags if that which is fine for a small catch but yeah. 

I must try it on other fish.