Pennsylvania Angler & Boater - November/December 2012 - 44

Recycling Fish
by Jeff Knapp
photos by the author

While they are being unhooked, large nets can serve as in-the-water livewells for holding muskies.

Squeeze type hook removers are excellent tools for unhooking fish including deep hooked bass.

Recycling household materials wouldn’t be very effective if a truck took your carefully separated collection of plastics, glass, paper and cans and dumped it into a landfill. As worthy as your effort may be, it would be wasted. The same is true of catch and release fishing. Released fish have the opportunity to provide others with sport and continue to propagate their species but only if they survive the ordeal. Proper catch and release fishing—recycling if you will—is a process that maximizes the odds of a fish’s survival. It’s a course of action that begins before you even hook a fish and ends when you watch it strongly swim away.

How a fish is hooked has a considerable influence in the catch and release process, in how much damage the fish sustains, the ease in which it can be unhooked and the time the fish is out of the water. Other factors being equal, single hook lures typically cause less damage than multi-hook lures. For instance, bass are showing equal interest in a soft jerkbait, which is fished with a single hook, and a hard jerkbait, which sports a minimum of two trebles. Choose the former option. Fish taken on multi-hooked lures have a way of pinning themselves with all of the hooks during their struggle, coming to the boat or bank oddly contorted. Typically, this scenario causes various degrees of damage during unhooking.

Hooking considerations

You can decrease the fish’s injury by squeezing down the barbs on hooks with pliers. If you maintain constant pressure when playing a fish, your numbers of lost ones won’t dramatically go up. After all, the “bump” at the pinched-down barb is still present, and it will be much easier to back the hooks out of a fish without tearing it up. Single hooks aren’t completely fish-safe. Deep-hooked fish are relatively common when using live bait and certain soft plastics like sinking worms. The use of circle hooks, which when used properly hook fish in the corner of the mouth, can greatly reduce the numbers of gut-hooked fish when using these baits. You don’t “set” the hook with circle hooks. It requires a commitment from the angler to become accustomed to their use, and the effort tends to be worth it.

Angler caught fish succumb from a variety of factors. A gill-hooked fish pumping blood is the apparent reason. Many are not so obvious, often the result of a combination of stresses that add up to a dead fish. Over-playing fish is one of them. Lactic acid builds up in a fish’s muscular system during exertion, an overload that is difficult to recover from. The stresses are amplified when the water is warm. Fish fight harder when the water is warm, and the water contains less dissolved oxygen. Use equipment that allows you to get the fish to the boat or shore in reasonable time without exhausting the fish.
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Playing the fish

Pennsylvania Angler & Boater • November/December 2012

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10/3/12 8:36 AM

Pennsylvania Angler & Boater - November/December 2012

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