esshup says -""Personally, I think the best way is to use a rubber net, leave them in the water and take the hook out with hemostats or someting like that.""
I wholehartedly agree. In-Fisherman and a few others suggest using a body cradle for handling large Esosids to minimize thrashing and injuring the angler and fish. Body squeezing is probably not very good either for the fish especially if the fish is gravid. The egg sac is highly vascularated and squeezing could cause maybe hemorraging around the egg sac? The only time that I think a fish ever really gets squeezed is when it is in the mouth of a predator.
The use of a rubber net is also probably best for netting a fish, although I confess my rubber net is very rarely used anymore. When I used light weight monofilament and some sort of sinker or also lures, and netted a walleye with a rubbber net my line and sinker would often get hopelessly tangled in the rubber webbing, and not nearly as tangled when using the cotton cord mesh landing net. The fishing partner in the boat would often be catching WE and teasing me while I was untangling my net fowled line. It was a good thing that the boat also had a "regular" net which I had to fetch up front to land fish while I had the rubber net frequently 'occupied'. Those were real fun times but not when I was catching all that light hearted "flack" for using that "dumb" rubber net. Who says all fish topics have been researched?
