This is a story I wrote for Anglers Journal about a fillet knife that I’ve had for nearly 40 years. It has played a part in many aspects of my life, including courting the woman who eventually became my wife. Editor Bill Sisson’s coverline for the story is “If That Fillet Knife Could Talk,” and it’s perfect.

A 20-plus-inch summer flounder I caught from my kayak in Barnegat Bay a couple of years ago, along with the fillet knife that I’ve had for four decades. 

Seven keeper fluke, plus half a dozen tailor blues that we’d found marauding a school of rainfish on the way in …not a bad morning for a young trout and largemouth guy wanting to learn the ways of inshore fishing from an old salt. Russ Wilson, the saltwater fishing columnist for the Trenton Times, tied off his Aqua-Sport at the Shark River dock while I hauled the cooler to the fillet table.

I jogged to my truck, collected the fistful of knives I’d put on the seat the night before, and dropped them on the table. Russ picked up a Buck boning knife and pressed the blade against the scarred, fish-scale-spackled tabletop.

“Nope. Let’s see what else you’ve got.”

Russ unsheathed the Rapala Fish ‘N Fillet and turned it, the sun glinting off of the thin, tapered blade. I’d bought the knife a few years before at a Herman’s World of Sporting Goods in a New Jersey mall, back when Ronald Reagan was just getting comfortable in the Oval Office, and I’d gotten plenty of change back from my twenty. The lettering on the cardboard inside the blister pack was a fat-seriffed font vaguely reminiscent of a 1970s porn flick poster. The knife had a thin wooden handle, came with an embossed leather sheath, and looked as if it would project filleting proficiency upon whoever happened to be handling it. At the time, though, I’d only used it to gut a few stockies.

Russ pressed the thin blade on the table, seeing it flex uniformly along the spine. The seagulls had begun gathering above, crying and dipping.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Move these others.” Russ lit a cigarette and picked a fluke out of the cooler.

Russ was a fireplug of a man, with thick, nicotine-stained fingers and the wide-legged stance of a sailor with a vocabulary to match, but had the fine motor skills of a brain surgeon. He quickly transformed all but one of those fish into beautiful, uniform, pearlescent fillets that rivaled anything on a bed of ice at a commercial fish market. Better, even. With my inexpensive mall knife! I was rapt.

I learned later that Russ actually had worked as a commercial fisherman…which probably was why he chose the Rapala out of the jumble on the table. The Fish ‘N Fillet, introduced in 1967, the year of the very first Super Bowl, was purposely modeled after commercial fillet knives that had been worn down after years of use and honing. Fish processors found those flexible blades ideal for following the contours of a fish’s skeletal structure to remove the maximum amount of boneless flesh.

I didn’t know any of this when I’d bought the Fish ‘N Fillet at Herman’s…but Russ did, instinctively.

“Good knife,” he said, handing it to me and coaching me through my very first fillet job on the last fluke in the cooler.

That was nearly 40 years ago, and I’m still using that same Fish ‘N Fillet.

Ron Weber would have been proud, but not surprised, because I was exactly the kind of fisherman he had in mind when he asked Finnish knifemaker Lauri Marttiini to create a fillet knife for American fishermen more than 50 years ago.

(Read the rest of the story at Anglers Journal.)