How To Keep
Your Fish
From Turning
Belly-Up.
Catch, release, revive. A choice most
flyfishers believe in. And, in many cases—
especially in heavily fished lakes and
streams—it’s the only option to keep our
fisheries healthy and fish populations
abundant.
The idea is simple, yet practicing catch-
and-release successfully isn’t always easy.
Fatality is a part of fishing. There’s no
avoiding it. Eventually, you’ll release a fish
that turns belly-up and there’s nothing you
can do about it. However, there’s plenty
we can do to minimize these fatalities. To
execute a flawless release you’ll need to
follow a few proven steps.
Step 1:
Fight Them Fast
From the moment a fish is hooked, it
loses strength. Although lengthy fights
are fun, fighting and landing a fish quickly
increases its chances of survival. I like to
use small stream trout as an example.
We’ve all caught three-inch lo ng brook trout
on a size-16 Royal Wulff. Most of the time,
the hook-set pulls the brookie right out of
the water and we see it dancing on the end
of our lines. The fish has had no time to
fight, and still holds most of its energy.
Once you unhook the fly and drop the little
trout back into the stream, it shoots off
like a bullet, right back to the boulder you
pulled him away from. You can bet that
spirited trout will forget he was ever hooked.
To the extent you can, you want to fight a
fish quickly—any fish, any size—so that it
retains enough energy to recover from the
fight and swims away strong and healthy.
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Photo: Dillon Given
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