I have now been there 3 times and have hooked a bunch of 23 inch blackmouth that had to be let go. The problem is, by my estimate, at least 25 percent of them were not going to make it. I was using a Coyote spoon and the fish would hit it so aggressively that many were caught in the eye, in the top of the head, and so on. It just sucks to let these fish drift off behind the boat when I would have kept them and filled my chinook limit just to not waste these fish. But instead I continued fishing until I caught a legal chinook and as such ended up killing 2 but only keeping one.

Come on WDFW, wake up!!!! Go fishing sometime and see what it is really like.

I think hooking mortality is worst for coho up in Sekiu for the selective coho fishery. It seems like I've had better luck with chinook releasing them unharmed... although really small chinook (9-12 inches or so) are sometimes hurt pretty bad while we are fishing coho.

I've wondered about the effectiveness of selective fisheries in the salt. Salmon are pretty prone to injury before hitting freshwater, and many fishermen cannot unhook salmon without netting them first (you've all seen the people that net the fish first and then look to see if it's clipped). Of course, when I read about people hooking 100 salmon in a day up at Neah Bay, maybe it's not selective fisheries that are the problem.

I've had similiar problems with certain hardware/hook combinations impaling fish in the upper palate through the eye.
Now this might run counter to the science, but what I found works in those instances is to go with a barbless treble. Even if you don't go with the treble, definitely pinch down those barbs.

Anybody else have any suggestions?

1. double hook set ups are death for coho, the trailing hook always finds it's way to hook itself in a high mortality area
2. reduce your single hook size and pinch the barbs
3. Don't net the fish, don't pull the fish from the water and learn to use the hook and dowl remover correctly.