Sharp Shooter

Do you keep the meat when bowfishing?

TheRick

Never have, they work great for fertilizer in the garden though!!! I've eaten smoked carp and it tasted just like anything else smoked but never tried doing it myself.

HNI_Christine

Most people eat the gar, buffalo, drum, and other fish that they take. Some are lucky enough to shoot really tasty things like rays and talapia. The bighead and silver carp are supposed to be very good also.

I know quite a few people who even eat the common carp that they shoot. I've brined and smoked carp in the past and it's really quite good.

The carp in the area I now live in are contaminated with PCB's and have a '1 meal per month' advisory. So... I don't eat carp from my area.

Sometimes bank fishermen want them and I'll give them away but I worry that I'm poisoning someone. [:'(]

Usually I just take them home, toss them in the freezer and then throw them away on garbage day.

Remember, common carp are detrimental non-native fish. Every one removed from our waters is a step in the right direction.

Bulzeye

I'm not much of a fish eater, but if I did, I sure wouldn't eat carp.
Since they are bottom suckers, they'll have the most contaminants in their bodies of any fish in the area.
They'll get it first, and they'll get the most of it.

I've heard the best way to prepare carp is to grill them on a board, throw away the carp, and eat the board.

I mainly feed the turtles and racoons by leaving them on the shore far enough up to where they can't flip back in the water.
However, if there is somebody fishing in the area that would like to have my carp, I'll give them every last one, and they are very happy.

JRW

If I rattled off every rough fish I won't eat, this post would sound like a fresh water rendition of "Green Eggs and Ham". When I want fish for the frying pan, that's what my fly rod is for--blue gills, crappies, catfish and such.

Several years ago, a friend of mine and I had the bright idea to cut up and cook a longnose gar I shot. Bar none, that was the nastiest thing I've ever eaten. And I've had some German food that'd knock a buzzard off a gut wagon.

These days, when I shoot a rough fish--be it carp, gar, sucker, or whatever--I return it to the Earth from which it came. I shoot rough fish for a lot of reasons, but sustinence isn't one of them.

Ossage

The hunting is fun but the wasting is not. Seems at times as though nothign will stop the carp from breathing. What happens if you shoot them and throw them back. I;m not advocating it, I just wondered if anyone has ever shot one with a big nasty arrow hole in it somewhere that looked healed over. They seem pretty hardy when shot in the body.

I know carp aren't supposed to be here, but the amount of bowfishing that happens around here will have zero effect, so one can't really feel good about that.

JRW

I wasn't talking about throwing them back in the water.

Ossage

I know the ones we shoot go back to the land as you mentioned. I just wondered how hardy they were if you shot and released them. Sometimes they wiggle off themsleves.

carptracker

Re: eating fish - I have an article coming out in the July Missouri Conservationist on how to debone and eat silver and bighead carp, both of which are delicious (but I like the silvers better, and the silvers dress out better - although Asian people generally prefer the bighead, which brings a higher price than silvers at the Asian market - but then they eat the head too.)

Re: survival of shot fish - I imagine that a fish that is shot through the meat and not through the gut cavity would have a high chance of survival, better than 50-50, based on my years of experience handling fish. But a fish with a nicked intestine is a dead fish, even if you shoot the fish up with antibiotics, as I always do when implanting radio tags.

E.J.D.

tracker...have anything on getting the Y bones out of buffalo?