Welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast with Tom Rosenbauer, bringing you tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the most from your time on the water.

Here's acclaimed fly fishing author and lifelong fly fishing

enthusiast Tom Rosenbauer.

Hi this is Tom Rosenbauer and welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide podcast. This week's podcast is about is about releasing fish

carefully and it's with particular emphasis on releasing small fish because I don't

think most of us take enough care in

releasing small fish we're we're probably a little more careful with the bigger

fish and then we get a small fish and we tend to just shake it off or throw it into the water and don't think

much about it. But the small fish are the fish that are going to be the trout of the future and not too many years. And small fish are a lot more

delicate whether they're trout or bonefish or tarpin or steelhead fry or Atlantic salmon fry. The small fish are a lot

more delicate and they're a lot more vulnerable. They're not as tough as the

big fish. Their mouths haven't fully calcified yet, so their mouths are mostly cartilage.

And you can disfigure a trout for life or kill it by not removing a hook carefully.

And there's nothing worse than fishing in a heavily fished area

as Simon Perkins mentioned on Facebook

and catching a bunch of trout with their

mandibles missing or or other pieces of their jaw missing.

Big fish are surprisingly tough, big trout, big fish of any species.

They're a lot tougher than we think they are.

Yes, you should be careful with bigger trout,

but they can tolerate a lot more handling

and a lot more rough treatment than small fish.

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