I must admit to being a little disappointed.

Here I thought that I was over-geared in the BW, and you guys are coming out with gear that I had never heard of before.  My tackle box is pretty full, but it can't be considered complete without one of those $100 fish grabbers.  And if it would double as a pot grabber/skillet holder, it would save me the weight of a vise-grips.  On second thought, maybe the vise-grips will do the job of getting a bite on the fish, so it doesn't get the bite on me, and I could save the $100 expense.  Just need to loop about 6 foot of parachute cord to it so it doesn't end up on the bottom of Knife Lake.

The other reason I'm disappointed is the whole idea of  "sure landing  a hooked fish."  Getting dinner into the boat is half....sometimes more than half the excitement.  Several times we've paddled to shore to beach the toothy leviathan rather than risk tipping,losing, or getting gnawed by it.  I still smile when I think of my buddy doing the Northern Pike Jig.  Strange how they can seem so docile and played out in the water and can get a second wind the moment they are fully out of the water.  A true dance-of-death.

We still land them by hand.  

I did have a big Northern up to the canoe once while fishing with my dad.  Having lost a laker earlier, he looked at it and said, "You're going to have to land that fish."  I said...OK.  The fish jumped into the canoe...with a little encouragement from me.  I don't think my dad thought of me as anything other than a fishing pro from that moment on.  No $100 fish grabber could have given 1/10th the satisfaction as landing that monster without a net.

Sometimes one of the guys will bring a net, but after they catch a Northern in the net, and spend the next hour working it out of the mesh, they look at their net as a poor substitute for experience in landing them by hand.  Besides....like I said earlier......bringing a nice fish into the boat by hand is VERY exciting!  If it wasn't dangerous, it wouldn't be near as much fun.