Recently I put a Pro-Mar soft mesh net bag on my Frabil/Cabelas big net. Pro-Mar soft mesh net bags seem pretty easy on the fish and their fins, but Pro-Mar net bags are for sh!t for everything else. Hooks get caught in them for days, and they are so deep that you feel like you are digging for a geoduck when you are reaching into the bottom of it.

Under most circumstances I just drag fish I am going to release along side the boat and use a de-hooker or pliers to let them go. For special fish I will sometimes go to shore and corral them for a picture.

Yesterday I was plunking with my buddy and he hooked an absolute screamer. It was a beautiful fish, high teens, sea-lice mean-ass buck. He was struggling with it using a salmon sized rod and reel with heavy line. We are in a location where the nearest beach is well out of sight, so the only way to get the fish is going to be from the boat. I tried a couple times to leader it and got the leader twice, but we realized quickly it would take another 10 minutes of pulling on him to get him tired out enough to make that work. I like to get them in green and released as quickly as possible. Out comes the Pro Mar net.

Buddy hasn't been steelhead fishing in 3 or 4 years, and his second fish of the day is one of his biggest ever so we would really like to get a grip n grin. We are in slow-moderate current on anchor. I could have released the anchor but there was a lot of problems with that idea as well. Finally he gets the fish on the surface and I scoop from the boat side out, his head dips and hook point snags just inside the lip of the net and I get about half of his body over the rim, and try to scoop around him but when I release the bag it just gets in the current and pulls the net downstream away from my scoop. The Pro Mar net bag is basically the same as a drift sock under water in any current. The fish starts thrashing with his head and 2/3 of his body just over the edge of the net. The 20# leader pops (I think the swivel or weight was caught in the net by now) and in an instant he is gone.

We are bummed, but the result was fine by both of us. The fish went back green, and we got the best of him so it was still worthy of getting the flask back out. My bud, will not accept the catch per IGFA rules, so I get my second botched net job in the last month.

So, the biscuit of all this is: Is there a better net bag for this? I like that I can net fish with the Pro-Mar and not hurt them, but I don't like the other issues that come with it. All that extra fabric getting caught on everything, and the way it acts under water. Have any of you modified one of these soft-mesh bag to be a lot shallower?

Thanks in advance.