I used to fish commercially in California about 19 years ago before coming to Washington State. I used a ton of circle hooks, but I never used them on salmon or steelhead. At that time there were no restrictions on the type or style of hook that you had to use on any fishery. But that was then, and I am sure that has all changed by now.

So here's what I know about circle hooks. They worked extremely well in the salt water on certain species of fish. We mainly used them on the various species of "rock cods". All of our hooks had barbs because we did not want our fish to come unbuttoned (ever). The hooks seemed to work best on the species that had wide faced mouths with larger lips (rock cod). They did not work very well for other species like Bonita, barracuda, yellow tail, albacore, or any of the other faster moving game fish species. They were extremely effective on all the cod species. One reason why they were so effective was that you really didn't have to "set" the hook to catch your fish. We used to leave our set lines out over night and pick them every morning, and we if had set them where their were lots of rock code, they would be loaded! It was not uncommon to have 30 hooks or more loaded with code on each pull.

We played around sport fishing with them too, but they just didn't really seem to work out that great. I do remember, that almost always, the fish that we did hook, were hooked in their lips. From the years that I did use them, I would not want to be restricted to using them on salmon or steelhead. Their mouths are entirely different then that that of cod, and I don't believe that they would work very well for them. I have never tried circle hooks yet on those species, so it's strictly just an opinion. The circle hooks seem to worked their best when you could allow the fish to "eat on them" for a long time. To me, that would not make them very partial for use in rivers for salmon or steelhead fishing.

Since I came from southern California, I never got the chance to use them on salmon or steelhead down south. I do know that there were certain species, that the circle hooks didn't work a damn on, but I can't tell you if they would work very well on salmon or steelhead, but my guess is that wouldn't work that well. To me it really wouldn't make any different if they were barbed or not, fish just don't come off of circle hooks very easy once they had been hooked.

It also took us a lot more time and handling to take the cod off our set lines then it did with the regular conventional style hooks. That's why we used them, because once that fish was on it stayed on!

So that my experience with circle hook in the salt. I hope that it will help answer some of your questions.


Cowlitzfisherman