Great Fish Jake!

Caught my first 20 pounder on the Elk River 18 years ago, by myself, and released it. No camera so I never got a pic, but was able to beach it in the shallows and keep it on wet gravel while I unhooked and measured it. But no worries, you didn't hurt that fish at all. It obviously has been in the river a while, has well embedded scales, and in the normal course of events fish scrape themselves all to hell on a variety of substrate, first trying to reach the spawning grounds, then in digging them up. Prior to that bucks run each other ragged fighting over hens, and will run each other right out of the water and out onto sandbars - seen it myself. Also seen fish smack repeatedly into rocks, trying to ascend falls, with apparently no ill effects. Compared to this abuse a few seconds on the sandbar is pretty minor. The fish you have to worry about are the immature fish, esp. in the ocean, where scales have not embedded yet, or chromers when they first enter freshwater and are a little shocky already. Anything that knocks out scales is bad news. Still, the outfit I managed in Oregon for several years transported chrome kings and silvers from saltwater to freshwater, by netting them out of a holding pond after crowding them to the head end (we used a soft knotless 3/8 inch nylon mesh net), hoisting them onto a semi, hauling them 100 miles, and dumping them into the freshwater hatchery after first subduing them and shooting them up with antibiotics and vaccines. After all that we had 98% survival to spawning. Fish are obviously tough enough to stand a little handling. Things like untreated stormwater, gillnets, or bonking them on the head are far more deadly than anything us C&R guys are doing to them. So again, don't worry, and lets back off a bit on being so critical of incidental fish handling, ok?