I'm relatively new to chinook fishing on the big river and have fished pretty hard below McNary for the last few years. My partners and I always cringe at the large treble hooks on kwikfish and the difficultly in releasing wild fish. We see too many people netting and/or boating wild fish, but its not necessarily because they don't know better, they sometimes, simply can't get the hooks out. I think we can all benefit from this type of discussion if folks are willing to try new things.

We've tried large siwash hooks on the tail as well as on the belly with chain. Has anyone experienced "short takes' where you get a couple of hard tugs and then nothing? We were thinking that some fish hit these plugs from the side and are able to let go when it feels tension. Is this common? I was hoping to hear from others about this.

We started experimenting with a smaller treble on the belly and a large siwash on the tail. This seemed to improve hook-ups, but did not increase ease of release.

Late last year, I started running a single siwash on chain from belly which seemed to work fine, but that was late in the season and I only hooked a couple more fish.

I'm definately going to look into those gammes...