Circle hooks effective in many diverse fisheries

[Sam]

The first time I used circle hooks was back in the late '80s when I used to spend my winters chartering out of the Florida Keys. In late winter the tarpon would move into the channels around the bridges and we'd fish for them with live pinfish or mullet. There's nothing too technical about that type of fishing -- just anchor the boat and send two or three baits back with weights or floats to cover the water column from top to bottom.


The toughest part of tarpon fishing seemed to be holding onto the fish when they took the bait. Tarpon are big, powerful, jumping, head-shaking machines with huge, bone-hard mouths. Even when we'd get good penetration with needle-sharp hooks, it wasn't uncommon to jump-off more than half the fish that took our baits.
Hearing that some of the locals were having good success using "Japanese long-line hooks" (circle hooks), I gave them a try and never looked back. By doing nothing more than using a different style of hook, our success rate more than doubled, and with the hook planted in the corner of the mouth, every fish came to the boat in good shape for a healthy release.


Then, when chunking for tuna became so popular in the mid-'90s, we all learned another lesson about the wonders of circle hooks. The small hooks and light leaders often needed to fool the tuna into taking chunk baits translated into a lot of lost fish.


But anglers who made the conversion to circle hooks immediately found that because a circle hook locks over the jaw, it's less likely to pull and keeps the leader from contacting the fish's teeth, thus allowing fishermen to successfully use a much thinner leader. Circle hooks provided tuna fishermen here in the mid-Atlantic the same win-win situation they did for tarpon anglers in Florida with more fish and the opportunity for cleaner releases.


While these are the most dramatic examples I've witnessed of the effectiveness of circle hooks, I know that anglers around the world are enjoying similar successes in a multitude of very diverse fisheries. Besides tuna, here on Delmarva anglers are adopting circle hooks as the weapon of choice for offshore bottom fishing, sharking, inshore flounder fishing and when targeting rockfish with live bait.
Though it's not being adopted as quickly as it did in the chunking fishery, in recent years a lot of bluewater anglers pursuing billfish, dolphin, tuna and even wahoo have been working circle hooks into their offshore trolling spreads.


Techniques for rigging natural baits such as ballyhoo, mullet, mackerel and squid have been successfully developed that allow anglers to substitute the standard J-hook with circle hooks and still have a bait that trolls properly behind a boat and (most importantly) successfully catches fish, an amazing accomplishment considering circle hooks were not originally designed to be used for trolling.


Billfish numbers are now so low that the future of healthy populations is in question. Because circle hooks almost always set in the jaw of a fish rather than in the throat or deep in the stomach, fishery managers are looking to them as a tool that will allow recreational anglers to continue to enjoy a (mostly) catch-and-release fishery for billfish without the added negative impact of post-release mortality.


On Jan. 1, 2007, the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented regulations that require anglers participating in billfish tournaments to use circle hooks. Then, just a few days ago this requirement was put on hold until Jan. 1, 2008. NMFS claims the delay was to "provide recreational anglers additional time to become more proficient with circle hooks and to increase awareness among tournament participants."


So, like it or not, billfishermen will soon be "required" to fish with a proven tool that will help them catch more fish. However, for the rest of this year if some anglers wish to fish the "old way" and continue to lose fish due to chaffed leaders and pulled hooks -- I guess that's OK too.

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