Bluegill - Big Bluegill

Do you love big bluegill?

 Pros and cons to bone in or bone out? 

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I filet more than I scale Earl.....I prefer filet and my wife likes the smaller ones on the bone.....I probably didn't help you!

new to this site but thought i'd chime in. used to just gut and scale but since the '70s been filleting bit occasionally will scale then fillet leaving the skin on.

Fillet......of course.

But every once in a while....bone in.

Growing up at home, it was always bone in.....

Now, it's fillet every time!

I fillet them all now, except catfish. My wife says the only way to eat a small catfish is on the bone. I like the tails left on em too. I do sometimes clean trout whole to put on the grill. 

fillet is the only way to go at my place

I am almost exclusively a fillet guy, but will keep bone in baked large trout or 24 inch class stripers.

depends on how tired i am, or how many beers ive had, either way is all good to me. ;)

When I was a boy a very long time ago we never fillet. Now I fillet the big ones and leave the bone in on the small ones, seems a shame to waste the meat that filleting misses. As for trout I never fillet. Of course I never caught one big enough to consider it.

Catfish, Trout, Salmon, Whitefish and Grayling, gut and throw on the grill with bones. They come out after the fish is cooked. Gills, Perch, and Crappie just fillet.

Big fish (like the Stripers, Sand Bass, Kentucky Bass, Catfish, that you see me posting up) get filleted.  Smaller fish, like the stunted Crappie from my home lake, or most Bluegill, I would prefer to "cut & gut", cooking whole.  However, She Who Must Be Obeyed has decreed that all fish must be filleted.  I don't like to mess around filleting smaller fish, so I don't generally keep them.

I keep and filet a few biguns(8 1/2" +) for the kids. Then a few in the 6" I keep for myself to eat whole.

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