What Kelly said.
Any gaff with a wide enough "U" shape will work ( so you can finesse the point of the gaff into the gap of your hook then with your free hand, hold the leader so it's south of the hook and taught against the "U" of the gaff. This allows the fisher to lift the gaff north while the tight leader is south which eventually turns the hook upside down and the fish falls off.
Here's a pic of the two Catch and Release tools I use the most often:
There's a bit of irony going on (picture of tools for Catch and Release with two dead fish). Well, both those two dead fish ended up in this nasty contraption:
Any fish that I want to eat goes in that fish-killing blue sack.
ANY FISH I WANT TO RELEASE DOESN'T GO ANY WHERE NEAR THAT EVIL SACK OF DEATH.
Both those fish were caught this morning. I post them with the C&R tools I use to with a bit of tongue- in- cheek irony...
I guess I pissed off some guys on the SOOKE THREAD by brow-beating a guy who has been doing some chest beating about all the fish he's catching. It's great that he does a shout-out to everyone about his exploits complete with piles of fish pix.
But after a while, I figured someone had to be the bad guy and gently remind him he ain't doing those C&R fish any favors by inviting them to his Hero Shot Party that takes place on the dance floor of his freaking boat!
Of course a bunch of people piled on and told him to keep it up and not to pay any heed to the "armchair fishermen" who never gets any and consequently, is jealous of people that do and thus, feels compelled to be a grumpy finger-waving nanny (the Nanny being me, of course)
So, I post the above pix showing that even armchair fishermen get a few from the comfort of their armchairs, BUT THEY DON'T USE FREAKING NETS for the one's they turn loose.
The point---If you're going to invite a spring to your Hero Shot party, make sure he's been freshened up with a wood shampoo before inviting him on to your dance floor
Here's the thing, Gents-- most of you guys are at the pinnacle of your sport. You've been through the numbers thing, you've been around resource extraction activities long enough to know that it isn't always about take take take.
So when you're out in the fleet doing your thing, it is great to help out the new guys with the where and the what and the when. But in the meantime, it's your responsibility to also steer them in the right direction about proper respect and attitude for the resource.
We're all been spoiled. We've had it pretty easy with access to the resource. But in the next decade there no doubt will be some tuning done by regulatory agencies to pull some of those sport opportunities we've been enjoying away from us.
Alaska is just to the North of you---they just shut down the entire June fishery on the Kenai River for lack of returns.!! The Yukon River is sucking wind on their spring return----there's some weird shiat going down with spring population dynamics both on the high seas and every where else.
Don't for a minute forget that all these hatch springs WCVI is pounding are exactly that----hatch springs that are only there because the funding was
So it ain't all a bottomless cornocopia of fish out there ----let's stay ahead of the curve with fish handling practices, help out our brothers by educating them (even if one of us has to be the Bad Guy Nanny and **** some of them off) , and hopefully we'll get a chance to keep practicing our sport for many more years to come.
Tight lines and bloody decks to all of you
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