What are the pros and cons of using barbless hooks when fishing? There seem to be three major schools of thought regarding barbless hooks, though most people most likely fall somewhere between the three.
Let's first define a barbless hook. This is simply a hook that has no backward facing barbs on it to retain the fish on the hook once they strike it. In short, it is nothing more than a curved piece of metal that is sharpened at one point.
The first group:
"Barbless hooks cause less damage to the fish than Barbed".
They have a good point, and in truth, i'm willing to guess that 50% of fisherman who use both styles of hooks, take the same amount of time to dislodge them as they do with a barbless. No doubt causing a rip to the lip. For those fishermen, a hook without a barb not only allows them to release the fish with minimal damage, but it also provides more sport when catching the fish since it is harder to bring them in, ...Theres a but...When you do use barbless hooks, whilst being a lot better for the fish when landed and actually unhooking and its even easier to shed when snapped off, its still not as healthy for the fish as a barbed one. Why? Well put simple its able to move around a hell of a lot more than a barbed hook, a simple test on a bit of foam can show you this. Get some foam, hook both types of hooks into the foam, make sure they are both the same type and shape. Then just give then an equal amount of force and see what happens, in 90% of the times i tried it the barbless hook actually makes a large circle when the barbed hook hardly did anything. Why? Because the barb holds it in place - Thus not dislodging the lip and causing holes a round fishes lips or even removing them all together. Thats probably why 50% of Specimen fisheries use a rule that your ONLY ALLOWED to use barbed hooks.
The Second Group:
"I dont like using Barbed hooks because if i get broken off then the fish wont as easily shed the hook".
I touched upon this in the above paragraph and in fairness its probably one of the main reason people have banned and/or dont use Barbed hooks, But just how long do you think a match hook could last in water?
Some tests have shown that varnished hooks (bronze, blue, etc.) and nickel or gold hooks, which are most common in freshwater, will break down (defined as being well corroded, brittle, and unusable though not totally decomposed), in two to three weeks of freshwater immersion, compared with 48 to 54 hours in saltwater. Some would estimate it would decrease the strength to around 10% of the original conditioned hook, so how long do you think that would actually last realistically?
The Third Group:
"I loose alot of fish when i use Barbless Hooks"
On many parts this can be true,especially when fishing for silvers or small fish as the tension isn't always there. A couple of ideas to stop this are:
- Keep you light tight at all times.
- Try to fish to hand if you can.
- Try to swing as many fish as you can.
- Try to use the heaviest elastic you can, its not always a good idea fishing with light elastics as as soon as you pull into the fish there is a second or so when the bungee effect picks the fish up and then loses all tension on the line.
Thats it from me,
Nathan
@Fish4Thought
