After strawberry picking at Sunny Ridge in Mornington, we decided to go cherry picking as well at a nearby place called Ripe 'n' Ready Cherry Farm. I was all ready for an afternoon of cherry stuffed bellies, climbing ladders and possibly fending off Asian tourists who are hogging all the good fruit. However, things didn't turn out as planned. We drove through the farm and it daunted on me that there really wasn't many good cherries on the trees. Most of the visible ones were pale red and looked very sour.
The 7 of us agreed in unison that we should go trout fishing instead of cherry picking just because we could. Turned out that Ripe 'n' Ready has a large trout fishing dam full of rainbow trout and as most of us had never gone trout fishing in a dam before, we were all quite keen to get our hands dirty. Entry into the dam cost $5 regardless of whether you catch anything. After that it's $19 per kilo of what you catch. Again like strawberry picking, cost of actually buying the fish outside would be a bit cheaper, but you're paying for the fun of catching your own fish and you know it's definitely fresh.
When Yuye cast his line (with the help of the farm staff above), it took literally 2 seconds for a trout to bite the bait. Yuye's fun was instantly over.
It was a reasonably good sized fish and a lively one at that. It jumped out of Yuye's hands as we were taking photos and he had to catch it on the ground and put it back into the bucket.
After Yuye's turn, one after another, people caught their own fish. My fish was one of the biggest ones! I couldn't even pick it up because it was so heavy and I was afraid the line was going to snap.
Since everyone caught a fish, the next thing to do was scatter fish food into the dam while the fish we caught get cleaned.
We threw them in little by little at the start and every time a few trout would jump and fight for the food. After a while, we thought, why not just throw the whole thing in and get a burst of happiness from it rather than in little increments? And so we did. This was the result.
6 fish were caught in total and the average weight for each one was around 1kg. After we got back, we split the ones we wanted to take home that night and left 2 of the largest for a BBQ the next day.
As the fish insides were already cleaned, all we had to do was clean the scales. It was no easy feat though as the scales on trout are very small and required a lot of hard scraping. As there were two trouts, we wanted to make two different types so one was lemon and herbs (using all herbs from our friend's herb garden) and the other was a Chinese style one with ginger, spring onions and a soy dipping sauce. Refer below for recipes.
