A lot has been written about releasing fish. In my experience, it is relatively easy to release larger fish but much harder to successfully release small fish. It seems like if you look at yellow perch crosswise, they die. Smaller bluegills are also hard to release successfully.
For a long time, I made all of our hooks barbless but that didn't really seem to help much. If a fish swallowed the hook, it seemed to die no matter what I did.
We tried circle hooks and our mortality dropped dramatically immediately. Even the yellow perch were lip caught and successfully released.
For me, this is an extremely important subject because people feel really bad about having a fish die when they throw them back.
Does anyone else have any experiences or ideas about releasing small fish?
