Damage to carp

[Nightwing]

What of the effect of cumulative captures? Coming from a place where the carp are "lucky" to be caught once in their lives, I don't have any real experience in this area, but would think that catching a fish numerous times, often several times in a year, would have a certain ammount of negative effect. Similar rigs will be popular in a water, at a given time, so the fish might well be hooked in almost the same place each time.

As to hook size, I think larger hooks if anything seem to leave less damamge! I think it might be because they are less prone to moving around and ripping/enlarging the wound. Nothing scientific mind you, but just an observation based on many, many fish. I use sz 6 up to 4 usually, and have little damage evident, but when fly fishing with much smaller hooks, I see more evidence of tearing by the small hook. I have also gone away from barbless, for the same reason, in that while slightly more difficult to extract, at least the extraction process is one the individual can controll, but the barbless hooks in general penetrate much deeper, and seem to enlarge the hole to a much greater degree.

[M.K]

This my be drifting of the sbjecta bit, but do you need a unhooking mat if you unhooking fish such as pike or carp in the landing-net, on grass?

[Gray-Catchpole]

another thing ive noticed with carp caught recently on many waters not just seven oaks, is line cuts, ie a split in the mouth region, if this was caused by a hook, then the cut(in my opinion) would not be clean, and would have some sign of tares and rips, but these are clean cuts, (again in my opinion) up until recently i have never seen this sort of damage on carp, now, could this be a combined effect due to method feeders and the strike, heavy handedness, and more importantly the current popularity of braid.

 

M.K your point was allready covered and explained by Dai.

[Bretty]

Isn't this sort of damage done when the fish is caught at the 1/2lb mark using size 20 hooks. The the disfiguration then grows with the fish as you can imagine!!!

 

I can't seen how this much damage can be done otherwise, by just one careless angler?

 

This is why some carp fisheries ban hooks under a certain size to avoid catching the smaller carp.

 

Bretty

[John 'BLOCK']

My opinion is that barbless hooks are better for the big fish as pressure is kept on easier.

Smaller fish tend to bump off barbless small hooks.

As for playing i think it has much to do with the possibility of damage.

this weekend for example i was fishing a lake which actually has fallen into disripute to some degree , but some good carp in there and not much else.I had one run,a real good take,i lifted the rod to play the fish and realised the line had got caught around a branch (as i said the lake has not been fished for a while and the trees really needed to be cut away !)

I was not in control of the fish completely and after releasing the line it made it to the weeds and snagged...Now it had worn itself out due to being tethered and it took my cousin a couple of minutes to free it.

When we inspected the fish the mouth had been torn by the hook....i reckon if the chaos with the snagged fish had not have happend the hook damage would ahve been minimal.But with it being stuck it was trying to get off the hook and this caused the damage.

We put some ointment on the wound and let him fully recover !!

So i would agree on how the playing of fish could be a reason for damage...but i'm sure that bullying a fish on a tight line does not damage like a tethered fish or someone pulling out of a fish through bad angling.

[phonebush]

We have carp so badly injured in the US that part or all their scales are missing. Does this happen in the UK?

Phone