Catch and release gear: four things decide whether the fish swims away

The four things, in order of how much they matter

It is worth being blunt about the ranking, because it is not the order a tackle shop would give you.

1. Time out of the water. Free. Costs nothing, needs no purchase, and is the single largest lever you have. A fish held up for a photograph for a minute has had a much worse time than one unhooked in the net and let go.

2. The hook you tied on. Nearly free. A barbless or pinched-barb hook comes out in a second; a treble with three barbs in a bony mouth does not.

3. What the fish lands in. A knotless rubber or micromesh net, or no net at all. Knotted nylon is the worst option and it is what most cheap nets are.

4. What you remove the hook with. Long-nosed pliers or a dedicated hook-out. Fingers are slow and slow is the actual problem.

Two of those four are habits and two are purchases. The purchases are on this page; the habits are worth more.

Mesh material is the one net specification that matters

If you read nothing else about nets, read this. The material of the bag is the decision, and everything else on a net’s spec sheet is secondary to it.

Both nets on this page publish knotless construction, and Frabill publishes it explicitly as a fish-protection feature rather than a durability one. Our fly fishing nets page makes the same argument for fly anglers and goes further on hoop shape.

The hooks-in-the-mesh column is not a side issue. A treble buried in knotted nylon can take a minute to free, and that minute is spent with the fish out of the water — so the mesh material ends up driving the thing that matters most.

Hoop size and depth, from the published figures

Two honest observations from that table. The small net publishes depth against each hoop size and the larger one does not, which is the sort of gap worth knowing before you order. And the handle is the only spec that genuinely separates a wading net from a boat net.

Size the hoop to the largest fish you realistically expect, not the average one. A fish that does not fit gets bent, half-netted and dropped, which is worse than landing it by hand.

Keeping the fish in the water is the free half of this

A net is not only a landing tool. Left in the water alongside the boat or against the bank it becomes a holding pen, and that is how you get the hook out without the fish being in the air at all.

The sequence that works: land the fish, leave the net in the water, reach in with pliers, back the hook out, and tip the net. Nothing about that requires lifting anything.

If you want a photograph, have the camera ready before the fish comes up, support it horizontally with both hands, and put it back. Holding a heavy fish vertically by the jaw puts its whole weight on structures that were never built to carry it.

Wet your hands first. Dry hands and dry surfaces are what a slime coat comes off on, and the slime coat is the layer the manufacturers are talking about when they advertise knotless mesh.

Hooks: the cheapest change on this page

Pinching a barb down with the pliers you already own costs nothing and makes hook removal dramatically faster. You will drop a few more fish; that is the trade, and for most people it is a good one.

Single hooks come out faster than trebles for the obvious reason. If you fish a lure with two or three trebles and release most of what you catch, swapping to single replacement hooks is a real option and it will cost you fewer fish than you expect.

Circle hooks are the bait-fishing answer, because they tend to find the corner of the jaw rather than being swallowed. Our hooks page covers the three shapes and why the sizing runs backwards.

And if a fish is hooked deep, cut the line close rather than digging for the hook. That is the one situation where the best tool on this page is a pair of snips.

What you do not need to buy

A weigh net or a lip grip scale, unless you genuinely want the weight. Hanging a fish from a grip by the jaw is exactly the vertical load described above.

A second net, in most cases. If you fish from both a boat and the bank, the long-handled net covers both awkwardly and the short one does not cover the boat at all, so buy the long one first.

Gloves, for handling. Our gloves page covers the three jobs gloves actually do, and protecting a fish is not one of them — a wet hand is kinder than a dry glove.

What this page is not claiming

We have not put a survival percentage anywhere on this page, and that is deliberate. Release mortality varies enormously by species, water temperature, depth and how the fish was hooked, and a single number lifted out of that context would be worse than no number.

What is on this page is what the manufacturers publish about their own products — hoop sizes, depths, netting materials, handle lengths — plus the mechanical reasoning that follows from it. Where Frabill does not publish a figure, such as the handle length on the trout net or the depth mapping on the telescoping net, we have said so rather than filling the gap.

We also have not tested these nets against each other. This site does not claim testing it has not done, and our pliers page takes the same line about the tools on it.