The cleaning table

By Matt Williams

May 09, 2008 07:12 pm

— STRONG — I would like to have a dime for every pound of catfish that has crossed the knife-scarred cleaning table that sits lakeside at Bill’s Landing on the upper end of Toledo Bend Reservoir.
I might not be able to retire a rich man with all that dough. But I could go fishing where I want, when I want, without having to think twice about the cost of feeding my pick-up another 30 gallons of $4.15 diesel.
“Bill’s” is what I call a fishing man’s fishing camp, a remote colony of cabins, mobile homes and travel trailers where bream traps, flatbottom boats and propane fish cookers add a fishy touch to the outdoor decor.
Anglers of all kinds frequent the quaint fishing camp, but it is more of a trotliner’s hub than anything else.
Trotliners are meat hunters. They collect their bounty using tarred nylon sets built with multiple hooks that are tipped with everything from live sunfish to chunks of cut bait sliced from perch, buffalo and shad.
The lines are usually strung between two stumps and baited just before sundown. Responsible linesmen will return the following morning to remove any takers, which usually includes a fair mix of blue, channel and flathead catfish of assorted sizes.
That’s when the fish cleaning table at Bill’s tends to dirty. Charlie and Rhonda Shively are usually smack in the middle of the mess.
The Shively’s own Bill’s Landing. They supplement their income by offering fishing cleaning services to fishermen who rent one of their cabins for an overnight stay. The charge is minimal in my book: .25 cents per pound of live weight.
“There was a time when we cleaned fish for just about anyone who brought them to us, but then it just got to be too much,” Charlie Shively said. “We finally had to scale back.”
Scaled back to the tune of 15-17 tons per year, that is. It is nothing out of the ordinary for the husband/wife team to go through 200-300 pounds of catfish into two hours time each morning, sometimes more.
“Cleaning 200 pounds is not that big of a deal — it’s those 700 pound days that can be a killer,” Shively said. “We don’t see those kinds of days very often, but they do happen. We have already had a couple of days like that this year. It’s pretty much a 6-7 hour job to clean that much.”
Bottomline: The Shively’s know their way around a catfish. They can take a 20-pound blue cat from the hanging hook and turn it into a tall mound of succulent white fillets in a matter of minutes.
The meat will be tasty, too. Not foul, like so often results when a fish of that caliber winds up in unskilled hands operating with a dull knife.
“I’ve heard people say that blue cat are too foul to eat, but that isn’t the case the way we clean ‘em,” Shively said. “The trick to cleaning a big cat is to bleed it out good and make sure to get all the fat off the meat.”
Channel cats weighing 1-3 pounds are a whole lot less trouble. None of that rank fat or tart, red meat to worry about on a fish that size. Just skin and a fistful of guts.
Cleaning a frying size cat is a simple process that calls for a cut here, a slice there and a firm grip for peeling back the slimy coat.
Shively offered a 10 step lesson plan for getting a frying- size catfish ready for a spicy corn meal batter and hot grease:
Step 1: A sharp filet knife is must. Shively says he rarely uses a sharpening stone, but he touches up the blade on steel after every fish. The sharper the knife, the easier the job.
Stop 2: Beginning at the back of the head, make two shallow cuts, one on each side of the dorsal fin. Join the cuts on the back side of the dorsal fin. Continue one of the cuts about two inches down the center of the fish’s back.
Step 3: Using skinning pliers, grab the skin on the top side near the head and twist downward, towards the belly. Pull the skin about halfway down the body and stop. Repeat the process on the opposite side. Alternate sides until the skin comes off at the tail.
Step 4: Make a shallow incision down each side of the anal fin. This allows for easy removal of the fin and bones later.
Step 5: Make a V-shaped cut beginning on the back side of each pectoral fin. The cuts should meet on the bottom side of the lower jaw.
Step 6: Make a incision just behind the anus and stop at the base of the ventral fins.
Step 7: Grab the ventral fins with pliers and pull to the head. This removes any remaining skin on the body cavity.
Step 8: Use the skinning pliers to remove the dorsal fin and remove the head.
Step 9. Open the body cavity and use the pliers to remove the guts.
Step 10: Use pliers to remove the anal fin, rinse until clean. Bag and freeze in water.
Matt Williams is a freelance writer based in Nacogdoches. He can be reached by e-mail, mattwilliams@netdot.com.

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