Grant Ferris
Grey/Bruce Outdoors

In Manitoba, hooks have been barbless for years with little or no fanfare. It’s accepted and only visitors from other provinces seem to be concerned that hooks lacking barbs will make them lose fish.

A barbless hook is a hook made without barbs or a hook that has had the barbs compressed to be in complete contact with the shaft of the hook. Legal barbless hooks in Manitoba may still have barbs on the shank for holding bait but if you are fishing, the hooks attached to all your lines, whether in use or not, must be barbless. Barbed hooks may be kept in the tackle box without penalty. 

In Ontario, barbless hooks must be used in a number of waters, including the Credit River in Caledon Twp. from the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park gate in Brimstone to Hwy. 24, parts of Whiteman's Creek in Brantford Twp., sections of the Grand River near Fergus and Elora and in other sections of the Grand where catch and release is the rule. When barbless hooks are required, a line must have no more than one barbless hook attached to it. Any extra hooks must be removed from lures.

According to my friend Tom Gion who lives in Washington State where barbless hooks must be used, wardens check hooks by running them through and back in the nylon of a pair of panty hose. If they stick, you are charged for using barbed hooks. This hardly seems fair as hooks with the barbs flattened won’t pass this test and flattened barbs are supposed to be acceptable. The regulations don’t mention whether or not the warden must be wearing the panty hose at the time.

So what’s the point of using barbless hooks? 

Any angler will tell you how hard it is to get a barbed hook out of a fish without doing more damage than the hook did going in. In fact, any angler that has had to get a hook removed from part of his anatomy will be able to describe the difficulty in some detail. The point is, hook points do damage, barbs do much more damage and if you intend to release a fish it is often a dead or dying fish thanks to the damage that barbs do during removal. 

In Minnesota, there is a special open season where anglers using barbless hooks can start fishing earlier than those who do not or will not switch. Several streams and rivers are reserved March 1st for an early “Catch and Release/Barbless Hooks Season.”

Other streams are open for catch and release barbless angling only during early April. All trout must be returned to the water immediately.
During mid-September the trout season closes for everyone except anglers using barbless and once again, until the end of the month, the catch and release anglers are allowed to fish when others cannot.

Our Australian cousins have outdoors groups that are urging the use of barbless hooks as even their enormous native freshwater Murray cods are showing a decline in numbers and sizes.

To quote one Australian fishing group: “Experience has shown that there is no appreciable increase in the number of fish lost when using barbless hooks. Indeed, some anglers claim that their success rate is higher when using them, as barbed hooks sometimes penetrate only as far as the barb due to the large increase in the diameter of the hook at this point.”

The whole issue on barbless hooks is this: if you wish to release undersized fish or any fish and not cause them to die or be totally disfigured, you must use barbless hooks or hooks with very small barbs. In Bruce and Grey counties I believe there is only one time when barbless hooks would put an angler at a disadvantage and that is when using a slider or cheater on a downrigger. During the seconds between a release and when the slider reaches the lure on your mainline, there is often slack line.

Often the only reason the hooks do not come out of a fish then is because of the barbs. This could perhaps be countered by using very sharp hooks which, combined with the easy penetration of a hook with no barbs, will penetrate better and make up the difference overall. 

My Oregon friend Derrel Hewitt who lives near the famous Clackamas River, says that bait and undersized hooks are responsible for more injuries and deaths in small fish than barbs are and that Oregon has regulations in some waters that address these problems by ensuring you don’t use hooks in the smaller sizes! It appears that before barbless hook regulations are passed, like with any rules, a lot of homework should be done.