welcome to st. Croix fishing calm today we're going to go ahead and fillet it some crappie and sunfish first I'm going to do a crappie here and I'm going to do this as traditional making fillets out of it first you just go behind that fin there and behind the gill go down until you feel the back bring the tip your knife along the belly say as close as you can the bigger the fish the easier get back to the tail there turn the Fisher on then start working on coming along the spine real light you should never have to force anything otherwise you can really hurt yourself now once you get this you'll have a line cut there on the spine you can actually some people will take and bring the blade all the way through to the back flip it over and then cut out the rib cage what I like to do is real softly go in there along that spine and rib cage work your way in there real light it should go like butter then once you get to the rib cage itself actually just real lightly work your way around and back down the rib cage so you're actually cutting that out prior it's kind of a small fish so it's a little harder actually cutting that all prior to taking this off the skin so then you take this go downward motion a little bit just to get to the back hold your finger on your left hand with some pressure go ahead and slide that off there you go there you have it and same thing for the other side you'll see how clean that is you flip it over same thing on the other side okay now we're going to go ahead and do the traditional kind of gutting in and of a sunfish same thing goes with the crappie usually I do this when the fish are a little smaller you can't get really good fillets out of them it's the way my grandma and grandpa used to do it a lot too and I'm sure many of yours first we start out go behind that same fin again here and oh I'm sorry first we're going to take and we're going to take usually that you can use a scaler or just a spoon and you go from tail to head on this we're going to get all the scales off trust me don't try this if you don't take the scales off a little rough like I mentioned you you can buy some little scaling devices or are made for this and work a little better in a spoon but I got okay so now we go ahead behind that pin I'm Gil we're going to take the head right off force that down a little bit make sure you got a sharp knife okay and then we're also going to take the tail off and then what we do here is we just go along the fin up there just creating a little slit on both sides and then we're also going to do that right here the bottom thin stay as close to the fin as you can now what you do is coming from the back of the fin be careful because these fins get pretty sharp here very pointed put the spoon back there and you go ahead and use your thumb and spoon to peel that out of there try to get as deep down as you can you also do that with this other one see those little rip right out of there for you okay now you still have the guts of the fish here you got a few people it's good to get a little assembly line some people can do the scaling while the others got the fish looks like it got someone to go 30 there they can put a little slip here then you go ahead and wash that really good and pack it and freeze it you can freeze it in water to see the ribs are still in there after you batter and deep-fry your pan fry these fish the meat will turn white put them on your plate and they will just peel right back and that ribcage will fall right out of there it's actually a really really nice way to eat some fish and crappie join us back again at st. Croix fishing comm for some more tips