Lindy Fish Handling Gloves: Protecting Fish and Your Hands

Learn the benefits of Fish Handling Gloves for conservation and safety and how to maximize those benefits.

“Net?” I asked, as my 15-year-old son Nathaniel gained control of a good trout and worked it close.

“I’ll use the glove,” he said, as he held the line tight with his rod and used his other hand to pull a Lindy Fish Handling Glove from his back pocket.

Well-rehearsed from many previous fish, Nathaniel slid his hand into the glove, maneuvered the fish to good angle and then stabbed like a heron nabbing a baitfish to grab the trout by the base of the tail. He then set down his rod, slid his rod hand under the trout’s belly, showed the fish to me, removed a barbless single hook and let the trout go, having never taken it out of the water.

Nathaniel first learned the tail-grab technique for landing larger trout by observing a veteran guide, but in truth it’s tough for all but the most experienced hands to get a quick grip with bare hands. He quickly learned that with a Lindy Fish Handling Glove, he could easily gain control of a large trout without having to use a net or touch much of the fish – and with minimal risk of the fish flopping out of his hands and landing on the rocks, as trout are wont to do.

Made with anti-cut SuperFabric® the Lindy Fish Handling Glove is an ultra-tough glove that dramatically improves grip and provides significant protection from everything from hook points to fillet knives to sharp fish parts. It is most commonly used as a fish cleaning aid, which is an important application, but cleaning fish is only one of many excellent uses for a Fish Handling Glove. Let’s take a closer look at these “handy” gloves and their values.

Fish Cleaning

Hand protection is the No. 1 virtue of using a Fish Handling Glove for cleaning fish. As careful as you might be, knives can slip, and the SuperFabric® front of the glove vastly reduces likeliness of cutting yourself. Beyond the obvious knife blade, various sharp parts of the fish you’re cleaning add the risk of cutting or jabbing yourself while cleaning fish.

Beyond protection, the grippy nature of a Lindy Fish Handling Glove adds significant efficiency for fish cleaning. Face it. Fish are slippery. They can be hard to hold when you are cleaning them, and holding a fillet to cut off the skin can be even tougher. Various cleaning board clips and grabbers have been devised to help secure fish during cleaning, but having the full functionality of your own fingers and a grippy glove is tough to top for the purpose of hanging on to what you are trying to cut.

Fish Landing

If you don’t always carry a net or prefer to avoid subjecting fish to a net or gaff, a Lindy Fish Handling Glove can provide significant benefit for hand landing. Technique specifics vary by fish type and situation, but the benefits of a better grip and protection from hooks, teeth and more remain the same.

Some species, such as trout, salmon, redfish and striped bass, often can be grabbed firmly by the base of tail. For the fullest conservation benefit, fish landed like this sometimes can be unhooked and released without ever lifting them out of the water. That said, it’s simple to slide your opposite hand under the fish’s belly to fully land it if you want photos or need to do so to unhook the fish.

Other species are best landed net-free by scooping them under the belly or grabbing the lower lip. Again, having a protected hand and better grip allows for more decisive movements, a higher landing rate and a reduced risk of getting a hook in your hand or harming the fish with sloppy landing. For any landing or handling technique, it's a good idea to wet your glove (just as you would we your hands) to minimize slime removal.

Fish landing benefits from Fish Handling Gloves are most significant for situations where you are planning to release fish and really wanting to minimize handling, for dealing with toothy fish in fresh or saltwater and for fishing with lures that have multiple treble hooks.

Fish Handling

Fish handling benefits are essentially extensions of fish landing benefits. Gloves aren’t needed for every species, but for many kinds of fish, having extra grip and protection makes it dramatically easier to unhook fish, hold them for photos, release them or haul them to a cooler.

For fragile species like trout, having a solid grip that keeps them from flopping onto the ground or boat deck without need to hold the body too tight proves dramatically better for the fish.

For rugged fish, like catfish, having hand protection against abrasive teeth and sharp fins simply makes them easy to work with. Grab smaller cats the same ways as normal, seeking to avoid tips of fins. The difference is you can grab with confidence. Big blues and flatheads are often best held for pics with one hand gripping the jaw or slid under the gill cover, and this is much easier on the hands with a Fish Handling Glove.

For muskies, northern pike and several species of saltwater fish, Fish Handling Gloves are all about protection from slashing teeth, big hooks and various sharp edges on the fish, and having a protected hand simply makes it easier to remove hooks and handle the fish in every way.

Livewell Clearing

Finally, a Fish Handling Glove provides big benefit when you are trying to get fish out of a livewell. If you’ve spent much time chasing fish in circles to get them out of a livewell, you know that a fish in water is quick and slick and tough to grab. You also know this is prime time for getting jabbed by a bluegill’s dorsal fin spines or a white bass’ gill plates or scraped by bass’ sandpaper-like teeth

While a Fish Handling Glove is critical neither for safety nor conservation in this situation, it adds major efficiency and spares a good amount of potential discomfort.

Right or Wrong Hand?

Most popular applications of fish handling gloves only call for a glove on one hand. To provide the most benefit, relative to cost, Lindy sells gloves individually and offers left- and right-hand versions. Therefore, it’s important to consider which version you want before buying.

While the natural assumption might be that a right-handed person would want a right-hand glove, fish-handling gloves are more like baseball gloves for many applications, and often it is most beneficial to protect or provide grip for your opposite hand.

Consider fish cleaning. The knife will be in your dominant hand, leaving the opposite hand to hold the fish and in need of protection. Likewise for most fish-landing and -handling situations. If you’re controlling the fish with the rod in your dominant hand, like most anglers do, you’ll use the opposite hand to swoop under the fish’s belly or grab the base of the tail or lower lip. When you’re holding a fish to unhook it, often you want the dexterity of your dominant hand to free the hook, again putting the fish in your off hand.

That said, if you’re apt to be mostly landing fish for someone else, you probably want a Fish Handling Glove for your dominant hand. The same applies for holding up fish in a way where your stronger hand will be closest to sharp teeth, fins or gill plates or in the most need of a good grip.

Fishing guides whose clients hold up fish for photos or whose hands are both engaged in the landing process commonly keep gloves for both hands nearby, but many anglers only need one, so think about uses before placing a Lindy Fish Handling Glove order.

Off the Water

While Fish Handling Gloves are indeed made for handling fish, the same grip and toughness make them outstanding work gloves for a nearly endless list of tasks that call for an extra measure of toughness. We’ll list a few examples, but you can come up with your own applications.

• Pruning Roses
• Weeding Briars
• Stacking Firewood
• Carrying Rough-Edged Loads

Visit Lurenet.com for all your fishing lure needs and for helpful how-to content. Use the code LINDY15 at checkout for 15 percent off all Lindy brand items. Discount expires 07/31/2021.