messiner;472620; said:hey juan, do you remove the barbs on the hooks?? you should replace the trebbels with single hooks even, especially if you intend to keep them. it makes me sad to see all those mir o lures stuck in all those cichla faces. im not critisizing but rather suggesting. im in FL and never even seen a wild PB. im such a loser.
I hear you. Unfortunately, most of these catches, about half goes to the frying pan, some in mine but mostly in family friends'. Most of the rest are released and a few about 10% lives in one of my tanks for a while until somebody takes it from me or replaced by a better looking fish and the older catch released.
Tried using lures with less pronounced barbs but the results was lost fish too many times. I would suppose removing the barbs would lead to the same results of lost fish. I've used single hooks when I started out fishing for these guys using plastic worms and found it was too tiring having to make so many casts before getting a hookup. The treble hooks just works so much better for me and lures with 3 trebles gets me better results than 2 trebles. Also, the single hook setup tends to get swallowed deeper into the fish and very difficult to remove without killing the fish.