Split tails

When we fish for bill fishes, Many times, we drag teasers behind the boat. Teasers often simulate a small school of bait fish swimming just behind the boat. We let the teasers " tease the bill fishes up from the depths and then entice them with lures or natural baits with hooks in them. On such teaser is called a dredge. It is an umbrella shaped thing with of course no canvas. There are normally about 8 arms on the dredge. We then dangle strings of split tail mullets from the ends and middle of the arms. Split tail mullet can get expensive. If we were to buy them, They run about 14 dollars for three 10-12 inch silver mullet that have been split tailed.. http://www.baitmasters.com/store/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=33&cat=unsilvermul 

On Thursday Kyle and I caught 700 silver mullet. On Friday we spent the day split tailing all the mullet, salting them and then Vacu-sealing every one of them.

 We figure we saved the boss Thirty three hundred dollars in bait. The split tailing is the hardest and most time consuming part. I split all the Mullet then handed each one to Kyle. He then would use a finger to remove all the guts and rinse out the stomach cavity. After that he tossed each one into a very salty cold brine. After all the mullet are prepped we then take each one out of the brine and drain as much water as we can off of them. We then shake salt on the exposed meat where the back bone was. When vacu-sealing the mullet we try to do about 5 to a bag. It was a lot of hard work but The mullet I do up myself last longer dragging in the water than any I have bought from a store. and besides

Kyle love to make finger puppets out of them.

On  Saturday, We fished on the Blue heaven. Black grouper season is closed right now ( because some college educated twit has decided that the numbers show Black grouper are endangered) So with the season closed we normally would have run further off shore and caught some mangrove snappers or red groupers. But the weather was to stiff for that. So we stayed withing 8 miles of the beach and fished. We caught 30 grouper that would be keepers And had to throw them all back. It was red hot. We fished only 2 spots and caught 30 big ones. We also lost another 15 bigger fish. NMFS ( National Marine Fisheries service ) has their heads up their asses if they think that Black grouper are endangered.