After contemplating what sort of regulation changes will be made for next year, it dawned on me. I thought about the barbless hook issue for steelhead salmon, trout, and almost all fish for that matter. I find it quite perplexing that here in the state of washington I have shopped a few big stores as well as little ones, but I have only seen gamakatsu barbless hooks in upturned eye salmon/steelhead/walleye style.

My question is, If we have regulations for barbless hooks for specific fisheries, why do fishermen have to bear the responsibility of pinching barbs down? It would seem to me that all stores should sell barbless hooks and that manufacturers should produce hooks without barbs. Also, it would seem like manufacturing barbless hooks would be a lot less time consuming than making those with barbs. Yes, I do realize that it would require a replacement of machinery or costly modifiications. But don't you all think that it would be a time saver if we didn't have to pinch down hooks? I think hook penetration would be greatly improved as well. Yes, I know that you can file down the barb section just as easily, but that takes time and effort which isn't always available when you're tying up a bunch of rigs and replacing trebles on lures.

Additionally I think that the definition of barbless needs to be changed. Currently barbless hooks may not have ANY barbs, but as all of you probably have experienced, barbs on the shank helps hold bait in place, but in almost no way infllicts damage to fish when taken out of the mouth. I really would prefer to fish with barbed shanks so I don't have to deal with the bait bunching up at the bend of the hook.