@Allen What other species did you target when commercial fishing Sak. ? Use all Gillnets ?
The law reads any non-gamefish can be taken commercially. I'm paraphrasing here, but that's the gist of it. The list of non-gamefish at one time included paddlefish, catfish, white bass, goldeye, all forms of carp and buffalo fish. Nowadays, those first three I listed are gamefish.
As far as the taste/texture differences between carp and buffalo, I really couldn't tell you as I have only begrudgingly tried carp (canned, it was one of the owners' brothers' own little venture into entrepreneurship). Shockingly it failed and he ate that canned crap for lunch every day we fished together for two summers. I digress, but IMHO...both are oily as hell and sold in the open fish markets primarily to the asian, black, and jewish folks based on what I heard from the distributor we shipped to. The distributor would send them to St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We gutted the buffalo before freezing them as opposed to the carp being sold whole. Either way, a "fresh" to the market fish was generally caught some 4-7 days earlier. I personally wouldn't ever keep a fish whole for up to a week before cleaning it. But them was the rulez.
I would have thought crawdad chasers would prefer the far less expensive eurasian carp over buffalo since the buffalo were easily 10X the price, but maybe that has changed since the early 90s?
during my year from hell i lived in minot just east of there on 6th street, i spent many an evening at that damn and a smaller one up north a few blocks.
