The depth of the bag should be tailored to the height of the sides of the boat as it floats on the water. The bag that keeps a salmon/steelhead suspended flat in the top 4-6 inches of water while hanging straight down from a horizontal hoop is the perfect depth.

If a thrashing fish can wrap itself in your net much like how you would twist-wrap veggies in a bag in the fresh produce section, then the bag is TOO DEEP to be a truly effective C&R net. You will be struggling to remove every fish that hits that net at the time of release. The handling time will be unnecessarily prolonged due to having to struggle with untwisting the bag and/or elevating a deeply sunken fish from the bottom of the bag to the water's surface for the de-hooking and release.