Caught these earlier today....now what??

Sturgeon Bait!

My thoughts exactly.

I started using my trout as crab bait. 
The bugs seem to like Hagg lake stockers.

I bread 'em and pan fry 'em over med/low heat with a cover on the pan. Usually in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Just butter when out camping. Sometimes I fill the body cavity with sliced onions and maybe I'll slice a little fresh ginger to put in there too. A little salt and pepper on the meat after I take it off the bones and peel off the breaded skin. (The breaded skin is good protection from the fry pan when cooking, and I usually discard the skin on anything I pan fry).

I will use any big oily freshly stocked triploids I catch for crab bait. Crabs like oily fish, or chicken that is past the "expiration date."

Using trout as bait, seems, ... sacrilegious.  They are delicious.   

I'll swap you my two trout for some shad or other sturgeon treats on Saturday.


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Using trout as bait, seems, ... sacrilegious.  They are delicious.   

I would agree, except for a couple of freshly stocked big triploids (about 6 and 7 lbs) that I bonked one year (from a local lake) were so oily, that when I smoked 'em,  the drip pan on my Li'l Chief smoker overflowed. Each one of those fish was nearly a full load for the Li'l Chief. I've never had a Chum, Coho or King put out that much oil. Kinda grossed me out! Oh yeah, and the meat wasn't pink, but off-white, and really felt greasy to handle. I haven't bonked any of those big ones since then. (I do have one in my freezer that a friend caught and didn't eat. When asked if I wanted to take it off his hands, I thought "crab bait!" So now I need to borrow a crab pot or two from my neighbor and go set 'em).
 The lake-caught trout I bonk and eat are usually around 13" to 16."   

I had a thought: Its almost carcass flinging time! That oily old cadaver might just become river nutrients!

Using trout as bait, seems, ... sacrilegious.  They are delicious.

The trout are stocked so often in our local lakes around here, and fished out almost as fast, that they don't get the chance to eat natural food to give them the "real" trout taste IMO. That said, stocked trout are not as delicious to me compared to the abundant of naturally occurring sea kittens out in the salt. 

I did keep and eat several trout for a late breakfast/lunch while up at Fish Lake in the Steens Mountains this summer.  It's a small stocked lake, with very little pressure.  Many of the fish are hold overs, as the lake is at 7500+ feet and not open for very long between Spring snow melt and fresh Fall blizzards.  The bellies were stuffed full of insects, and ironically very similar to the flies we were dragging around the lake at super slow trolling speeds via kayak. 

Yeah, I caught trout at 7500 feet.....in Oregon.....from a kayak.....Booooyah! 

Awesome pics dude!

The trout are stocked so often in our local lakes around here, and fished out almost as fast, that they don't get the chance to eat natural food to give them the "real" trout taste IMO.

Know what you mean Craig...these fish are stocked as surplus or bonus offerings to the public, and the WDFW fully expect them to be harvested, rather than wintering over and adapting to their environment. That said, they're sort of the stoners of the Trout world. They prefer bubblegum and chartreuse plastics to flies that imitate caddis larva, shrimp and other buggie critters.