http://www.ginkandgasoline.com/steelhead/you-may-be-killing-steelhead-and-not-even-know-it/
After watching a bunch of fish bouncing on the Church Pool beach last week, this seems very appropriate. (Tuna, you forgot yours and took no pics because of it- you have ethics and restraint, unlike most.)  I'd like to see a C and R bulletin placed in the lot  bulletin boards that tell you the best way to land and release. Nets help. If you're gonna rope it fine, otherwise, why waste them?

As you know I'm a big believer in using a net for C-P-R fishing.. If I had my net I would have taken many more pictures but as I said, I wasn't going to drag the fish , let it flop in the rocks while I dug my camera out then snap a pic and "kick" it back in the water.. A net , especially a rubber mesh, will allow the fish to rest "in" the water while it takes me the minute or so to get the camera out..
I do it for pretty much all my open water fishing..
 
The only time I shy away from using a net is when I fish for salmon with no intentions of taking pictures.. I tend NOT to like netting salmon because they thrash around too much in the net.. Just beaching them , unhook and then "kick" them back to float down stream..lol..
 
Here is the first and only pic of steelhead from my last trip.. After this one all others never made it on the rocks..

 
And the spike that has 9 lives... It was staring down the barrel of 2 different guns but still lives another day..

I have not been using a net for the last few years, but after last week i went out and got one and am going to start taking it and using it.
I don't keep many fish....personally don't like to eat them because other than smoking them i can't make them taste good to me....so i let almost all of them go.
Watching them flop around on the rocks doesn't seem like a good thing, so i've been snapping pics while they are still in the water then popping the hook without touching them.
But to do that i have had to play them to exhaustion.  I'm not sure which is worse for them.....so i think the net is the best of both worlds.  Keep them in the water, but not need to completely play them out.
With salmon i generally just tail them.