Pressure Bleeding Salmon

[Andrew P]

Ok, so I’ve now been regularly doing the pressure bleeding this season on about 75% of fishing hitting the deck...and the difference really is night and day. I’ve always been adamant about bleeding...but add some pressure and there is no comparison.

It is a bit of a pain to do solo...but if you have someone on deck and you are messing with it...it will likely trigger another bite!

Also, I’ve found that the brain spike as apposed to a club really helps too with meat quality. Spike the brain...then work it in to find the spine and essentially paralyses the fish. It’s quite something how limp the fish goes and doesn’t get rigger mortis. Apparently this stops the stress response and production of stress hormones. It also seems to help the initial bleed out from cutting one gill because the heart keeps pumping. Then after a couple minutes rip/cut out the gills insert the tube and pump out the rest...and even with a good bleed out...a lot more blood will come out.

Anyways, I’d recommend giving it a try.

 

[Chasin' Dreams]

I never let sea water touch open raw meat ever. When fish are drawing water through their gills no water touches the meat. They just use oxygen from the water. When I pressure bleed my fish it is all done from my fresh water tank. Any little sink/pump/tank set up will be very sufficient for water pressure for bleeding a fish. My washdown pump (drawing ocean water) is only used for spraying blood down off the deck and fish hold, never to clean the inner parts of a fish. The amount of **** that's in ocean water is scary to imagine letting that spray all over the open meat of the fish.

I can just see it now a bunch of guys in a pack of boats bobbing around pressure bleeding their fish with their ocean water wash down pumps and another bunch of boats around them pissing and shitting into the water. Not to mention guys waiting till they get into a harbor to do it and using the ocean water that everybody has been pumping out their boat's waste holding tanks and bilges into. MMMM sounds delicious! Notice how lodges have fresh water going to their cleaning tables... It would be a lot easier for them to just pump ocean water up to them but that would be gross and definitely not approved by health/safety...

At 1:10 of this video notice how they specifically tell you they are using "a continuous supply of clean water to reduce bacterial build up"

At home before I cut up and vac pac my fish goes on a stainless table where I use RO water to do any final cleaning. We are on well water at home and our water has 250PPM minerals even after going through two pre filters so it then gets ran through a third 5 micron filter then 4 RO membrane filters before finally getting to my processing table. Might seem a bit excessive but I'm a bit OCD with that stuff. But the ocean water stuff not touching open meat should be a very obvious no no to everyone I would have hoped.

 

[Chasin' Dreams]

Some pics of my set up.

If you wanted to set up a freshwater fish cleaning system on any boat and didn't have a built in reservoir and pump etc all you need to do is plumb in a 12 volt pump to any kind of water reservoir. Cleaning a few fish doesn't take too much fresh water. Even a 10 gallon tank would be more than enough if you put a little ball valve on it to control flow.

 

[Ian wagner]

I never let sea water touch open raw meat ever. When fish are drawing water through their gills no water touches the meat. They just use oxygen from the water. When I pressure bleed my fish it is all done from my fresh water tank. Any little sink/pump/tank set up will be very sufficient for water pressure for bleeding a fish. My washdown pump (drawing ocean water) is only used for spraying blood down off the deck and fish hold, never to clean the inner parts of a fish. The amount of **** that's in ocean water is scary to imagine letting that spray all over the open meat of the fish.

I can just see it now a bunch of guys in a pack of boats bobbing around pressure bleeding their fish with their ocean water wash down pumps and another bunch of boats around them pissing and shitting into the water. Not to mention guys waiting till they get into a harbor to do it and using the ocean water that everybody has been pumping out their boat's waste holding tanks and bilges into. MMMM sounds delicious! Notice how lodges have fresh water going to their cleaning tables... It would be a lot easier for them to just pump ocean water up to them but that would be gross and definitely not approved by health/safety...

At 1:10 of this video notice how they specifically tell you they are using "a continuous supply of clean water to reduce bacterial build up"

At home before I cut up and vac pac my fish goes on a stainless table where I use RO water to do any final cleaning. We are on well water at home and our water has 250PPM minerals even after going through two pre filters so it then gets ran through a third 5 micron filter then 4 RO membrane filters before finally getting to my processing table. Might seem a bit excessive but I'm a bit OCD with that stuff. But the ocean water stuff not touching open meat should be a very obvious no no to everyone I would have hoped.

I can't believe that you eat anything that comes out of that disgusting ocean

 

[REID NICHOL]

A few points. After sports and commercial fishing for 40+ years I thought I knew everything there was to know about fish and fish handling. We learned to look after net caught fish well enough to receive considerably more than iced troll caught prices for them. We would never eat spring salmon because of the smell and the taste until one day we had a large bucket of prawns, a bucket of crab and 4 springs when I said I would not eat the spring. My partner said he was sure I would after he had prepared it. As he had take the time to properly bleed our fish, it was delicious. We learned long ago to do what people are calling "power bleed" (with fresh water) because the salt in the blood will slowly migrate and concentrate all around the spine of a fish. With large fish or loading a home freezer with too many pounds at once, slow freezing allows migration and concentrating you do not get with commercial flash freezing. This salt never freezes and the frozen fish continues to deteriorate. I had quit eating spring salmon long before I learned to properly bleed my fish and as we always had lots of sockeye, why would I eat a fish I thought smelled bad and had a bitter taste to it? While sports fishing I have had enough arguments with "professional guides" about doing a basic bleed, never mind cleaning, until these idiots can get a weight to boast about, that I only deal with my own fish and keep quiet. There is a second very good reason to immediately clean your fish and it is latent heat of metabolism. When you kill a fish, the energy which was propelling it along, immediately turn to heat and begins to deteriorate the flesh. For instance, in a coho full of red feed, with in 20 minutes, the stomach can rupture and the acid will attack the flesh, turning it to mush. Back to our trick of getting high prices for our net-caught fish; We had a garbage bucket full of salt-water ice, containing salt water with means the temperature is @28°F. When you have many fish to handle at once as they come from the net, you quickly cut the gill, toss it in the bucket and then clean it after setting the net back out. Getting rid of the latent heat ASAP and power bleeding is what gives you the flesh quality. Our buyer checked for ammonia content in the flesh and could never understand how we could attain the low level normally only found in troll caught fish. Although it has take 40+ years for "power bleeding" to finally come to the attention of sports fishers, better late than never.