It freezes well, so you don't have to eat it all at once. You can transect them in between vertebrae for approximately 1" thick steaks, the way that swordfish is often cooked, but we fillet them (take the flesh off each side of the spine in two big slabs) and cut the fillets into pieces. On each side, they have a pair of muscles separated by a blood vessel that runs the length of the body close to the spine. That blood doesn't taste good, so I trim that out, and the muscle boundary beneath this is also a logical place to divide the fillets into smaller sections.

As an aside, this is where catch care can make a big difference to eating quality (as well as minimising the animal's suffering). I immediately give them a rap on the head with a small club (I use a hammer handle abandoned in my car park by a thief) to knock them unconscious (they have extremely sharp teeth and are quite dangerous) and then drive a metal spike through the brain to instantly kill them. I immediately cut the arteries below the gills and take advantage of the fact that the heart continues to beat for a couple of minutes after brain death to flush the majority of the blood out of the fish (incidentally, there is a better location to cut tuna). After reading a really handy document about onboard catch care of tuna for the Japanese market, as soon as practicable (i.e. not while a school of tuna is swimming past, as you need to take your opportunities when game fishing from dry land) I now also cut around the anus, allowing the gut to be removed intact, which I do, along with all other organs, at the same time as removing the gills after cutting them free. This removes a huge amount of the bacteria responsible for the meat decaying. Then we get it as cold as possible to minimise bacterial action. A wet cotton cloth does a surprisingly good job of dropping the temperature, although it's often not easy to find shade.

Back to the cooking the fish. They don't have scales and their skin is thin, and I leave it on. The flesh is relatively oily, so is well complemented by something acidic, such as lemon or lime juice. The flesh is firm and stays together well. I cut the fillets into smaller pieces about 1" thick and I briefly marinate them in olive oil, lime juice, chilli, salt and lemon pepper before frying them on a barbeque hotplate or a hot frying pan. It's quite delicious. It is actually quite nice eaten cold the following day, too.

Fish and chip shops deep fry it like they do with snapper and shark, which also works well.

One of the parts I enjoy about catching these fish is cooking the frame. After filleting, as well as the head (good shark bait, if that takes your fancy) and the tail, you're left with a thin central section of the body containing the spine and the flesh and bones extending above and below it. It's really good to cut that (between vertebrae) into sections that will fit onto a BBQ hotplate, season it and cook it up. Everyone gathers around and picks off morsels with a fork. The flesh is firm enough that you can just pull it straight off the bone and it will hold together. It feels pretty caveman (in a good way). There must be fat along the spine because the meat collected this way is quite juicy and somewhat gelatinous, a little like eel the way the Japanese eat it (unagi cooked kabayaki style and sold as unadon or unaju) but with a milder flavour. So good!

Yeah - admittedly, I had to delve into the archives to find some that size and I have never caught any that big (lost a couple to massive sharks though and a couple through inept gaffing - to be fair, it's pretty hard to do with a gaff on a rope from a cliff when you can't see). There aren't too many places in the world you can catch them from the land - we drive 16 hours to get to this one (Steep Point - westernmost point of the continent). We rarely go there anymore because it can get crowded and unpleasant. There are a couple of alternatives for those of us without boats, but we don't like broadcasting them.

With a bit of luck, I'll be visiting my mate in Dampier over Easter, which should be similar fishing to what you're used to. We'll take his boat out and try for some coral trout, red emperor, spangled emperor and saddletail sea perch (they probably have different common names in your part of the world, but I think they are the same or similar target fish on the bottom) and troll around for some mackies. He's got a new lure (or really a skirt for use with bait) design since I've been up there - it looks quite ghetto, but he learnt it off a guy that used to fish for them professionally, so that gives it some instant credibility. It is basically a skirt for use with a garfish, and is made from a chaff bag, a "torpedo" sinker (see attached pic), and some tape (I'd use that shiny air con ducting tape). You troll it slower than the big minnow lures (e.g. Rapala Magnum) at about 3 or 4 knots and he reckons he gets some big mackerel hitting it, some of which he's landed and some have got away. I've got a few ideas I want to try out too, based on the techniques that freediving spearfishers use for mackerel - mainly mirrors (not too big or they think it's a sailfish or marlin and disappear) and rattles.

I've been trying to convince my mates to consider smoking fish like the "Australian Salmon" which doesn't freeze well and only appear for a short time. Nobody here seems to smoke fish. I saw the Kiwi guys from Beg Engry Fush (Big Angry Fish) doing it with kahawai, which is the same as the east coast "salmon" and closely related to ours in the west, and thought it was a good idea. If you haven't seen Big Angry Fish, I recommend you check it out - easily my favourite fishing show on TV. For starters, they're not trying to sell you lures or other sponsor's gear all the time, they primarily fish with bait (from boats) but there are plenty of reasons to like it.

There's nothing wrong with VB! :-D

You've piqued my interest with the barramundi comment - we might have to continue this conversation in Steam or something. :-D Then again, there's nothing like a practical demonstration and I do like QLD. I only recently decided to look up tuna poling to see how they do it, and learned that as well as berleying/chumming with cubes of bait, they use a water spray because the droplets hitting the surface sound like baitfish feeding. I thought that was pretty cool.

View attached image.