How To Remove Crankbait Hooks Without Hooking Yourself

Hey folks Glenn May here with BassResource.com. One of the questions we get on the forms an awful lot is how do I remove the crankbait hook from a fish without hooking myself? Well I've been fishing for a couple dozen years now with crankbaits and I have yet to hook myself. So I'm gonna show you what I do, and maybe you can incorporate some of those tips into your style of fishing.

So, first thing I want you to notice here, see how this rod is bent over like this? Well, that's a spring. That is a loaded spring, and if the hook should come loose when the fish is near the surface of the water, say for example when you're reaching for the fish, or I know a lot of you guys grab the hooks, or grab the other line first before you reach for them, the hook should come unbuttoned at that time, the rod's gonna fire that, that lure right back at you mach 80. And trust me, you're not to be able to avoid it. Your gonna get hooked.

So first thing we need to do is eliminate the rod from the equation. You do that with the net. I always use at net one when I'm fishing for crankbait fish. So there we go. This isn't a very big fish, but I'm doing this for safety purposes, not because the fish is big. So now you can see the rod isn't loaded up. Matter of fact, it's done, we're not even gonna to talk about this anymore in the video. That hazard's been taken care of.

So next is, I still need to reach in there and grab the fish. Well if you notice, grab any crankbait out your box and you'll notice that there's a spot where the hooks can't reach. And typically that's right where the line tie is. So on a billed crankbait that's, you got a perfect handle there. You can grab right in the front right on the front of the bill and you're not gonna get hooked. On lipless crankbaits well you're probably going to have to grab the top, right by the line tie, not a big handle there. But this is a lipped crankbait so I'm gonna grab top of the crankbait here. Alright, let me do it with this one here.

Now I got that, I got control of the lure, now I can grab the fish. And typically when you grab these fish, when you first touch him, they're gonna flinch. So you need to grab them with really fast and firm just like that. Ok, he didn't flinch but sometimes they do.

Now I've got control of both the lure and the fish. He flail around all he wants to and I'm not gonna get hooked. So now I still need to remove the hooks.

So I'm not gonna do that with my fingers. We're talking about a live animal here here and can flinch and flail, so I don't want to get my fingers near that. So I'm gonna grab needle-nose pliers. Always always always use needle nose pliers when you're removing the hooks. It's just a safety feature. I know it's a convenience factor when you grab to the lures by your fingers and it's it's easy to do that, to forget to grab a pair of pliers, but always use pliers. And I've got this fish really good. There we go. Let go.

There we go. And now he's ready to swim off, and I'm ready to keep fishing. Hope those tips helped. For more tips and tricks like that visit BassResource.com.