Employing the right techniques in how we fish is the first step to helping reduce our impact on our fishery and the marine environment. The next step is to avoid catching fish you don’t want.
Selectivity is the key word when it comes to considering which techniques will best help target the fish we want to catch and keep.
There are several techniques that you can use to improve your fishing success while reducing your impact on the fishery, these include:
- Use suitable lures, like softbaits or slow jigs.
- Use big baits with big hooks, preferably circle hooks.
- Use Target appendage hooks.
Modern lures such as softbaits and slow jigs of suitable size not only catch fish of legal size more often, they are far less likely to gut hook fish.
If the lures you choose come fitted with treble hooks (stickbaits for example) change these to single hooks as these do less damage to the fish and make it easier to release the fish.
Single hooks are safer to use especially if the fish is prone to thrashing around during handling.
