In the romantic comedy Jaws, officer Martin Brody is chumming the water when the giant shark suddenly appears. It’s then that he realizes how outclassed he is and utters the famous line, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

When I shot a monster grass carp a few weeks back, it wasn’t until I got home that I realized, like Officer Brody, I was sorely under-matched for the task at hand. This fish had a girth of 31 inches and was four feet long. That was way more than what my trusty Rapala electric fillet knife could manage. Filleting this fish was going to be a project on a completely different scale (pun semi-intended).

Only days before I had been crawling under my jeep with a reciprocating saw intermittently holding back swears and cutting off a snapped bolt on a swaybar link. The idea struck me, ‘Maybe I could swear at the grass carp!‘ Then another, more reasonable idea came to mind, ‘Maybe I could fillet the fish with my reciprocating saw!‘

Time to break out the extension cord.

The video that follows is a record of my first attempt at filleting a fish with a power tool. How do you think it turned out?

There’s nothing like trying to not screw something up while your four year old daughter provides color commentary in the background.

Aside from fish oil covering and stinking up my entire life for the next two weeks, I’d say this experiment was a success. I sliced each fillet into sixths, rinsed off the excess oil, then froze each individually. Had it not been so late, I would have taken the time to remove all that deep red nervous tissue on the meat, but I was too tired. I’ll do that when I prepare each cut.

Monster fish require monster solutions and I think we found one here. Now I just hope my family and friends have appetites to match; my freezers are packed to the gills!