It was a classic bluefish blitz on a pristine autumn day. After catching and releasing several blues, I put the rod aside and picked up the camera while observing other anglers in action.
I noticed several spin fishermen wrestling with treble hooks, long-nose pliers and bluefish teeth. After mangling the fish to a degree, some anglers literally kicked them back into the wash. But one fly-rodder stood out from the rest and made it look easy.
Retrieving blue after blue, she deftly slipped the hook from the marauder's jaws while leaving the game fish partially submerged. Then she was quickly casting again. I knew immediately she was using a completely debarbed hook.
Barbless Situations
A wild blitz is one event where a debarbed hook pays handsome dividends. When school-size striped bass are easy and abundant during springtime, a barbless hook permits fast releases.
Fishing on jetties and rocks is a tough game - here, a barbless hook takes a measure of difficulty from landing and releasing fish from the rocky structure and generally allows a snagged fly to be worked free. Certainly any fly-fishing newcomer will feel more secure learning jetty techniques while employing a pattern with no barb.
Of course, a barb is designed to penetrate a fish's mouth and then stay there. Trouble is, it works that way all around. Anyone who fishes hard and long - particularly under adverse conditions - most likely will deal with 
hooking their clothing, waders or skin at some time.
A few years ago at the West Wall, a popular Rhode Island jetty, two fly-rodders (at different times) gave me firsthand testimony of regretting to use barbless hooks. Both had tossed weighted patterns in windy conditions, and each had inadvertently hooked his face. The fishermen had used debarbed hooks on prior trips and were convinced that had they been doing so the days they suffered their accidents, the end results would have been much different.
Instead of aborting the fishing trip to have an embedded hook surgically removed, they could have slipped the fly out with much less aggravation, perhaps even avoiding a follow-up visit to a physician. Fortunately, these accidents are infrequent, yet most of us can relate similar stories of when a fly with the barb removed would have lessened the severity of a mishap.
