This is what I did Saturday night...

[Crissytal]

Saturday night I went out with my dad on his 16' Land Au boat to gig some flounder. We have a pretty simple set up. Two lights hang down from the front of the boat into the water, they connect to the generator. We have a couple smaller lights that connect to a battery so we can see around inside the boat. This was the first time that I've been this year, and I believe only the second time for my dad. We used to go almost every weekend. We didn't except to see much due to all the rain. We were wrong. We saw lots of small flounder that were only a few inches long to just undersized, a small sea turtle, and some kind of eel or sea snake. In the state of NC, flounder have to be 15 1/2" from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. If you are floundering on the ocean side, it's only 14". It seems like only last year the size limit was 14" in the Inter coastal waterway and something like 13" for ocean side. Anyway this is what we came home with:

I had slight difficulty getting it inside the cooler. It took both of us to get it inside the boat.

The tape reads around 25"

The other ones look so small

One mullet literally jumped into the boat at some point, the other...well I gigged it. One we are going to try to eat, the other is going to be used as bait for red drum.

Hope to have either some fried or grilled flounder this weekend! I got them filleted Sunday afternoon (yes I can fillet a fish, paper thin to be exact).

Enjoy,
Crystal

 

[rattler]

very cool.......flounder taste anything like halibut? never had flounder but i do like halibut......

 

[Crissytal]

I've never had halibut myself, but I think it's safe to assume they should taste similar. As a guide, flounder isn't a strong fish like salmon or the mullet will be. It's rather mild.

 

[Jayson16]

Sounds like you had a great time. Flounder and halibut are both mild tasting fish, so I would say they are alike. Thanks for sharing.

 

[swords]

Flouder are such weird fish! I like how they taste though cos I don't really like that "fish" flavor. Never tried a fresh one like that - is it much different than frozen (I imagine it's way better). I haven't been fishing in at least 17 years!

 

[Crissytal]

I had a very good time!

Flounder are extremely strange fish. Their ability to cover themselves in the sand can also be their downfall. The other fish that we came across generally leave pretty quick when they see the lights. The flounder think they are hidden and just lay there. We would have had a total of five, but I missed one and my dad missed one as well.

swords - the fresher the better! That's more than what the three of us here can eat. I think we ended up with 4 decent sized meals; enough for us each to eat 4 times. They have been put in the freezer for a later time. They do keep their freshness very well. 17 years?! You need to get out and go fishing, even if it's just at a creek or pond lol!

 

[DavyJones]

Wow, wanna take me with you sometime? Flounder is so tasty, and hard to find here in south-west Ohio!

 

[swords]

Thanks to the 3M scotchguard plant (where one of my uncles works) the lakes around MN metro area are pretty toxic and it's not recomended that people eat fish out of the lakes/rivers very often. I think the paper said once a week for healthy adults. Only recently have they begun seriously monitoring & testing their liquid output (now my uncles job).
Some people do eat local fish all the time but who knows if their vestigal tails will shrivel up and fall off when they quit eating it?