Outdoors: Releasing trout safely, allowing them to fight another day
Many anglers today release their fish but I'm surprised how many never bother to crush down their barbs. Barbs are tenacious and can be very difficult to remove, almost impossible to extract without injuring the fish, sometimes quite badly. These difficulties can be removed easily by using needle nose pliers to collapse the hook's barb and or by removing 1 or 2 shanks of a treble hook, the remaining single will hook very well by itself. This nice brown trout gave me quite a tussle and was released without any harm by using a spinner with only a single, barbless hook.
Photo by Wade Robertson
Local Sports, Outdoors, Sports
May 14, 2026

Outdoors: Releasing trout safely, allowing them to fight another day

The spinner arced across the stream, landing a foot from the bank. I flipped the rod tip up to start...
bradford

The Bradford Era

More by this Author
Outdoors: Buck of a lifetime
By WADE ROBERTSON 
October 22, 2026
When my good buddy, George Duncan, informed me he planned to start hunting again I was thrilled. Five years earlier he found himself surrounded by man...
Read More...
Fall decisions: To hunt or to fish?
By WADE ROBERTSON 
October 14, 2026
Wow, it’s fall again and the weather is noticeably cooling, the streams are up and lake temperatures are down. I should have been born twins to take a...
Read More...
Outdoors: Pre-rut strategies
By WADE ROBERTSON 
October 8, 2026
To bag a giant buck requires more than luck nowadays. True, you may be lucky and stumble onto a wall hanger, but the most successful hunters first loc...
Read More...
Local & Social