wet hands

[2weightfavorite]

Just a reminder, if you're not keeping your fish be sure to thoroughly wet your hands before handing them. A dry fish released has a terrible chance at living. Take pictures in shallow water, try to avoid dry rocks, dirt, and leaves. Hopefully I can find some delayed mortality stats to post to help emphasize the point.

[HuskerFlyFisher]

Good post. I didn't do this until my last trip out of ignorance. Doing some research, I even discovered that some don't handle the fish at all with their hand - they use a cloth or something.

[ChemEAngler]

Originally Posted by 2weightfavorite

Just a reminder, if you're not keeping your fish be sure to thoroughly wet your hands before handing them. A dry fish released has a terrible chance at living. Take pictures in shallow water, try to avoid dry rocks, dirt, and leaves. Hopefully I can find some delayed mortality stats to post to help emphasize the point.

Another bad habit is laying the fish down on rough ground for a pic. Just hold it in one hand and snap with the other. Not that difficult and allows for a much faster release.

[2weightfavorite]

i think using a cloth or something like the sorts would be even worse than a dry hand. even if the cloth was wet...

[Crockett]

Every time my son who is 6 is with me he wants to keep the fish to look at it longer. Of course we can't do that we let it go quickly so it can live on. I saw online where some guy had built a custom "viewing box" to look at the trout he catches before releasing them and that gave me the idea to get one of these:
http://www.rei.com/product/767560/sea-to-summit-x-bowl

It collapses down real small and light and most of the small trout in the Smokies would fit in it fine. I figured I could put a trout in it and we could look at it for a minute or two before releasing it. I think that would be enjoyable and fun for him. Of course temporarily holding a trout against it's will may be against some regulation. If so then I will ignore that regulation.

One of those squishy bowls might work too. I think the trick is to not stress the fish too much aka just keep it captive for a minute or two which is quite a long time when you consider how brief most c & r events are but still not long enough to probably cause any harm to it.

[ifish4wildtrout]

Good reminder to us all. If you don't believe wet hands are critical. You ever grabbed a fish with dry hands? They stick to your hand.

[David Knapp]

Great reminder! That's one thing I don't like about fishing tailwaters is that there are usually some fish caught that were obviously "dry handed" not too long ago... I've taken to not even touching fish when using barbless hooks but just reaching down and slipping the hook out. Of course, if I want a picture I still go through the wet hand routine...

[flyman]

Just put your foot on it's head and give the line a quick upward jerk That hook will come right out!

[NDuncan]

Originally Posted by flyman

Just put your foot on it's head and give the line a quick upward jerk That hook will come right out!

I prefer the "false cast as rapidly as possible until he flies off" method