On day one I just used one of the cheap knives that they had but it was a completely miserable experience. Seriously, I guess I've been using spydercos so long that I'd forgotten what it was like to use a POS knife...a DULL POS knife.
Even when we got in and hit the cleaning table all they had were some cheap dull kitchen knives. I'm used to cleaning with Phil Wilsons knives and some of my own designs so cleaning with a 5 dollar kitchen knife was like parking your Ferrari and driving a Yugo. Painful. So on day two I decided I had to have a decent knife. I stuck the Millie in my waistband and hit the ocean. We fished for about 4 hours and towards the end I hooked up on a pretty big Cubera Snapper. I landed the fish but there's no place to put the fish in their kayaks except between your legs. I was not going to paddle all the way in with a flopping fish with bone breaker teeth so I had to use the Millie like a fish Hunter. The thicker blade didn't work quite as well as the purpose designed FH but I got it through that hard bony head and found the sweet spot eventually. A fair bit of pushing and twisting was required but no damage to the blade at all. Once we got to shore I decided that even though the Millie isn't an ideal fish cleaning knife it was better than those cheap kitchen knives. I fully filleted the snapper with the Military and used one of the kitchen blades jsut to do the skinning. It was indeed a much nicer experience than the cheap and dull knives they had.
When it was all said and done, I had a knife that had a few light stains from corrosion and some blood and scales stuck in the pivot. That said, the blade was undamaged and the lockup was still solid despite me hammering the butt of it with my hand to penetrate the snapper head. The edge was still shaving sharp and still had a fair bit of bite from the 600 grit finish. It's no secret that I love my Salt knives but this knife performed quite well even though this type of use was a bit of a challenge. I almost didn't bring the knife that second day because I didn't want to "mess it up" but taking it out and putting it through the paces reminded me that we often underestimate what a good tool is capable of. I wouldn't choose a Cruwear Millie for an everyday fishing knife but it certainly wasn't an unreasonable decision to use what I had with me. It did just fine I would say.
Here's a pic of the Snapper with the Millie. I had already brained the fish when this pic was taken. I just stuck the knife back in for the pic. Just explaining in case anybody was wondering why the knife is so far back in the head.
