How We Got Started
You know what they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Such was the case with the Measure Net.
Inspiration for the net came to Jeff Abel during the summer of 2000 while he was fishing the upper Green River in Wyoming. The Green is wide, and as he fished the middle of the river, he would often catch large fish that he wanted to measure. It was so cumbersome to get a measurement while holding the fish, his rod and his tape-measure, not to mention stressful on the fish, he had to wade back to shore if he wanted an accurate measurement. Or mark up his rod as many fishermen do, but he didn’t want to resort to that.
After another fishing excursion on the Green, he was determined to make a prototype of a net that could measure any fish. He marked a piece of webbing at one-inch intervals with a black pen and safety-pinned it to the bottom of a landing net. The next time he went fishing he tried the net. It didn’t work as planned because the webbing kept twisting up, but he knew the concept was sound.