Secrets of the Matchmen Revealed

With striking size of hook should also be considered. Ray or flounder swallowing a hook is no big issue until it gets into there guts. The smaller the hook the quicker this happens. For example a flounder can be left for a couple of minutes with a 2/0 but size 2 should be reeled in much sooner. Artery forseps and pliers should always be in your kit bag. When unhooking ray I've found they can continue to try and swallow the hook when landed. With Dogfish sand eel allows for a more likely self hooking than mackerel.

Donagh

What are you trying to tell people that all you need is white ragworm what a load of horse s***,white ragworm have there place like most baits. But they are not the answer to all your fishing success. You are trying to get anglers to go out and have a heart attack digging these very hard got bait. They will get some and when they go out and use them they will be very dissapointed and then never fish again , because they think i had the serets from the matchmen and it still wont work.Here are the real secrets , hard work in preparation and execution being lazy is not an option in matchfishing that why so many people fail. Now if you want to fool anglers into thinking there are secrets be my guest.

it is a fact that smaller hooks do less damage to fish than bigger hooks, u try taking a 2/0 out of a flounder, and then a size 4... you cant accurately judge how deep a fish will be hooked if you leave a bite for 30 seconds or 10 mins.
you only need to look at coarse angling to see that 99.9% of fish caught go back alive, and they use size 18 or 20 hooks as standard.
i know that it is a different style of angling, but the principal is the same.
perhaps if people used lighter tackle and learnt how to unhook their fish properly, there would be a greater survival rate.