One of the joys for catch-and-release anglers is spending time catching fish, and if there is a way to release the fish quickly, the fishers can stay out on the water longer.
High Country Fly Fishers, the Park City chapter of the nonprofit environmental organization Trout Unlimited, has a solution. It’s called a CRT, which stands for “catch and release tool,” a device made out of wooden dowels, metal eyelets and box hooks, which releases the fish by utilizing its weight.
Utah Fly Fishing Hall of Fame inductee John Schultz, the club’s board member and past president, got the idea during a fishing trip a few years ago.
“The club used to go out on Fish Outs, where we would all head out and fish together,” he said. “There’s a private lake called Crittenden Reservoir in Nevada, west of Wendover, and the manager of the lake goes out with fishing groups to protect the lake.”
Schultz remembers seeing the lake owner fishing out of the back of a rowboat he had rowed out and anchored.
“He was catching fish after fish, and I watched him bring them up to the back of his boat and release them after hardly getting them out of the water,” he said. “He was doing it really fast, and I wondered how on Earth he was doing that.”
Schultz, who was fishing in a pontoon boat, kicked over to the lake’s owner and saw what was happening.
“He had what looked like a screwdriver handle in his hand, and he had folded over the metal coming out of the handle into a hook,” Schultz said. “He showed me how he would bring the fish up, slide the thing down to connect the hooks together and reverse the leader, which turned the fishhook upside down. If there was no barb on the hook, the fish slipped off immediately. If there was a barb, it just needed a little bit of a shake.”
Coincidentally, another of Schultz’s friends who lives in southern Utah, had made something similar out of plastic.
“He sent me one,” he said. “I used his a little bit, but his wire was so thin it broke. So, I thought I could improve on this.”
Schultz, who lives in the Wasatch Back, visited the hardware store and bought a length of dowel, some cuphooks and some eyelets and put together his first CRT.
“I test drove a couple of them, and they worked, so I made a dozen of them for some friends in the club,” he said. “A lot of them didn’t know how to use them, so we had to write an instruction plan. And since then, I always carry a wooden fish with an eyelet in it so I can demonstrate how to use the thing when I give these things away.”
Before Schultz perfected his CRT, many of his friends, including William Quapp, another High Country Fly Fishers past president, would catch and release fish the old-fashioned way.
“We put the fish in the net and then reach down and try to grab the hook with our fingers,” Quapp said. “Sometimes it would come out easy, and other times it wouldn’t. So we would use forceps.”
Forceps would either ruin the fly or break the hook, according to Quapp.
“The upside of the CRT is that it’s good for the fish, who don’t hold still, by the way,” he said. “So we’re not fighting with the fish out of water trying to release the hook. We’re also making it a lot easier for us to release the hook without ruining the fly so we can continue fishing.”
The CRT is also healthier for fish the anglers release, according to Schultz.
“Fish, especially trout, have a slime-protective coat on their bodies, and if you touch that slime, it opens up the opportunity for infection to get to the fish,” he said. “That’s why it’s recommended you wet your hands really well before touching the fish.”
The CRT also limits the time the fish is out of the water.
“You can bring up a fish and release it in about five seconds once you get the hang of it,” Schultz said.
Making the CRTs is easy.
“We cut the dowels to length and then bevel the ends,” he said. “Then we predrill both ends and dab a bit of superglue on the screws of the eyelets and hooks before we twist them in.”
The final touch is a printed label, according to Quapp.
“The label has High Country Fly Fishers’ name and Timberline Ace Hardware in Heber because the store donates the dowels,” he said.
Schultz and Quapp, as well as a number of High Country Fly Fishers members, carry extra CRTs when they are out fishing.
“If we see some catch-and-release fishermen and women, we do a show-and-tell and give them one,” Schultz said. We did make some for a conservation project in 2021 because we thought it was a good thing to do to get the High Country name out and save some fish.”
To date, Schultz and the club have made more than 500 CRTs, and they are in the process of making 500 more, some of which will be given to serious catch-and-release fisherwomen and men during the upcoming Wasatch Fly Tying & Fly Fishing Expo that runs April 10-11 at the Mountain American Expo Center in Sandy.
“This is the first time we will hand these out during the Wasatch Expo,” Schultz said. “There are a lot of people who attend the expo who don’t fish, so we want to give them out to people who will appreciate them and take time to listen to us.”
Wasatch Fly Tying & Fly Fishing Expo
- When: April 10-11
- Where: Mountain America Expo Center, 9575 S. State St. in Sandy
- Web: wasatchexpo.com
- For information about High County Fly Fishers, visit highcountryflyfishers.com. For information about the catch-and-release tool, visit highcountryflyfishers.com/catch-release-tool.