Northern Pike are one of the most commonly caught fish in Northern Minnesota. Weather your fishing for them or walleye, odds are you’ll be pulling one in from time to time. Northerns can get quite big and make for a great meal when canoeing in the wilderness. One draw back to these slimy fish are a strip of bones embedded in the meat of the fillet called y-bones. Some people leave them in and deal with picking them out while eating them. There is a way however to remove the y-bones while saving most of the meat. Jim shows you HowTo remove the y-bones on a Northern Pike.
Y-Bones – HOWTO from Bill Bryson III on Vimeo.
Another nice episode Bill. Jim does a great job demonstrating and explaining the cutting process. Keep up the great work!
Very nice, that looks way easier than the way I’ve been doing it!
@Roger: Hi Roger, thanks for commenting. I hope you find this to be an easy way to remove those pesky y-bones. It sure makes eating a lot easier without the bones in there. How have you been trying to tackle the process? What are your thoughts on eating Northerns? Some people won’t go near them. We think they are pretty tasty. Thanks for watching.
Bill
Jim makes it look so simple… I live in Colorado but have a place at Kenora on LOTW. Not many of the locals up there will eat “slimers”, “slough sharks”, “snakes”… LOL As a young North Dakotan up there we ate plenty of “Jack Fish”. I’ve just never gotten proficient at cleaning them. Then again when you’ve got local talent that can take you out on the lake and more often than not you’re tossing Walleye (or Pickerel north of the border) at each other within an hour of starting to fish… Paddling makes you happy for whatever jumps on the line? Do you guys ever resort to GPS for finding reefs for Walleye in the BWCA?
Thanks for the show. It’s as close as I can get to be up north without living home here in CO.
@Greg Heimbecker: Hi Greg, Thanks for commenting. Your last sentence is one of the primary reasons we do this show. We love providing high quality video and audio of the BWCAW to those who are unable to come here themselves. So far on the trips we’ve been on we fish to supplement the food we brought in with us. Its not the primary source of food so we really don’t hit the fishing that hard. We spend a lot of time getting film and traveling along the lakes and rivers. We do fish on every trip and what we do catch ends up in a frying pan for dinner. We have not used a GPS device for finding reefs. We currently don’t own one that has that feature set. We probably would put one to use if we had one though. 🙂 Is this something you’ve found useful for finding great fishing spots in the BWCAW? Has anyone else been successful using one to guide their fishing locations? More information on this would be nice.
Bill