cleaning sturgeon the easy way

 ive seen people clean sturgeon and the most popular way for some odd reason is to do the thing with the spinal cord and gutting the fish , we have found a much cleaner and easier way that is also more timely ,
ths way we dont dull up our fillet knife , instead we use a box cutter with the blade out like a 1/4 inch , we do 2 inch slits from the head all te way to the tail starting at the top of the spine first then make our way downto the bottom , once we get our slits we then use pliers and start pulling off the skin and if u did it right by not going in too deep with the blade then the skin pops off skutes n all! once the fish is skinless we then bust out the fillet knife and go to work starting at the head , we pretty much let the knife do the work and when were done we end up with 2 big steaks and a intact sturgeon carcass that folds up nice in a trash can then goes wherever u wanna put it , the meat then goes inside and gets the red meat cutt off for steaks.

That's the way to do right.  I pretty much do it the same way.  I'm still surprised by how many people still use that nonsense, time consuming method of pulling the notocord and all.

The Cunang brothers say to remove the notochord doing the tail cut and pulling it out. I did it that way the first time.Never again.Last time I just filleted down from the top andremoved the side and then removed the remaining skin with the fillet knife. Thanks for the photos. I still would like to see the pics of Northern Boy cleaning his sturgeon from this year in the apartment bathtub though.

The only time it makes any sense to remove the noto cord is if you are steaking the fish out.

I agree... filleting them is the way to go...  here's my twist on it...

http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/index.php/topic,7082.0.html

I guess that would require actually catching a sturgeon; a skill which I lack considerably. 

The only time it makes any sense to remove the noto cord is if you are steaking the fish out.

I agree... filleting them is the way to go...  here's my twist on it...

http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/index.php/topic,7082.0.html

I almost forgot about Erik's excellent tutorial.  He also taught many of us all we know about dino hunting from a kayak.