[midgetwaiter]

There's been a lot of pictures of nice trout on the forum lately taken when the fish has been pulled up on the shoreline. This often causes serious injury to the fish and it occurs to me that a lot of people probably don't understand how this happens. I don't want to single anyone out here and I hope everyone finds this informative and tries to keep any comments constructive.

Anyone that has handled a fish knows that they have a mucus coating on them, aka slime. This mucus is very important to the fish's immune system as it creates a barrier that parasites and bacteria can't penetrate. Any significant damage to this mucus layer leaves the fish much more vulnerable to disease. This layer also helps fish move through the water easier so a fish with a damaged slime coat has to expend more energy to swim or hold it's place in a river.

When handling a fish you want to take care to do as little damage to the slime coat as you can. Make sure you wet your hands or net before you touch the fish. Use a rubber net rather than fabric if you can. Handle the fish as little as possible. One thing that you NEVER want to do is put that fish on dry sand or rocks. Bringing them into the shallows where they are scraped against wet rocks is bad enough but dry sand will remove a lot of the mucus layer very quickly.

Most people are unaware of this so again I don't want to single out anyone but if you pull a fish up onto the shore for pics you are doing serious damage to it. I know it's really hard to take safe pictures of your fish without some help, I've decided to confine myself to taking pictures in my net or not at all unless I have somebody else using the camera while I deal with the fish safely. Yes I miss a lot of good pictures but I'd rather that than damage a lot of fish.

With any kind of catch and release fishing you're going to do some damage to the fish. It's something that all of us have to make our peace with. I think however that we all have a duty to keep that damage to the minimum possible. Unfortunately this is just not consistent with getting the photos you might want all the time.