ycflyfisher,.... I chose to treat the situation of using a fly/pegged bead as applied to snagging on an individual fish. If a fish is hooked outside the mouth, its is illegally hooked and must be released. I concur with your description of intent required to prove snagging. I believe that the drafters of the language in the section were attempting to describe those who deliberately attempt to snag fish. We've all seen the guys or there lost or abandoned very large treble hooks with lead wrapped shanks and/or over legal weight jigs with larger than legal sized trebles and it seems to me that's who is being targeted by this section, not the fly guy's who occasionally hook a fish outside the mouth and release the fish.
I've seen some borderline situations before. Once on the lower Eel River at Singley Pool in a low water year (before the low water closures were adopted) where Salmon were stacked up in a deep, confined hole and fly guys were anchored in prams in shallow water, casting to and regularly hooking some very nice fish. Those fish were all released. Now, I was fishing downstream and not having a lot of luck as the hole where the fish were was locked up by the fly guys in prams. After the group quit fishing, I saw one of the fly guys was a person I knew. So, I asked to see the fly they were using to catch all of those Salmon and was shown a silver Comet with a white saddle hackle tail and the same for hackle with bead chain eyes, tied on a short shank 1/0 hook. He, also, told me none of the fish hooked took the fly in the mouth. They were all snagged/released. Technically, this was legal (or at least they thought it was) as the fish were released, unharmed. But, to me that was still snagging. This situation was so obvious that wardens couldn't have missed it. Yet none were present. So, maybe the regs on this subject are ambiguous or low priority....
Last edited by Darian; 12-28-2017 at 11:50 PM.
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