advTHXance
Well-Known Member
What a ridiculous assertion!You bring up an important and overlooked aspect of barbless hooks. It is the efficiency in which you are able to sort thru the shakers that has you back in the water faster impaling more fish. If you had to physically handle each fish with care to remove the hooks you lose lots of fishing time. Lets say you have a barbed hook and land a nice keeper Chinook which you netted. Now you spend ten minutes out of the water getting your hook out of the net and loose fishing time. How about the barbed hook gets caught in you sweater, lost fishing time. What about the days when an angler gets a barbed hook in the hand? Lots of lost fishing that day! Now lets say you have barbless hooks and you just want to catch one fish to retain but every time you stop the boat to real in the keeper Chinook the hook falls out! Now how many shakers do you impale in continued attempt to catch that last Chinook with barbless hooks? Only in political optics does barbless hooks conserve salmon. It was simple the, "green" thing to do. In the function of fishing for salmon they have little conservative benefits.
If barbed hooks were allowed I believe it would help me lessen the impact of my business of assisting people to harvest their legal limit of salmon.
First of all if youre planning on possibly releasing fish, you should be using a rubber mesh netbag, which a barbed hook will almost certainly not bury itself in the net as it would a twine net bag. Youre also assuming that youre going to land a fish that must be released every 20 mins and while that might be the case occasionally, its far more likely the exception than the rule. I dont personally know who you are, or where you fish, or what your guests are like, so Im speaking in a general sense. I fish maybe 150-200 days a year and atleast 100 of those are with guests - for 10 hours a day, so I have seen my fair share of unorthodox techniques, but I explain to my guests how the rods/reels work, how the fish fights, and coach my guests through it. Even the most clueless landlubbing greenhorn guests land most of their fish with a little positive encouragement.
How often do you get a hook in your sweater? By the sounds of things thats also happening every 20 mins. You must be really unlucky or really clumsy!
If your guests are losing every fish with barbless hooks, maybe try "guiding" them on how to play a fish, or help them out with varying the speed of your kicker, or a hundred other things. Or just take the lazy route and slap a big fat barb on there so it doesnt matter what your guests do with the rod.