Clearing out my parents garage I found my grandpa's old tackle box. Found some interesting stuff in there but I am curious about this tool. It says "Fish Gripper" on it so I originally thought something to do with hold fish but it certainly does not look like that to me. Since he had a ton of split shot weights I am wondering if this is a tool dedicated to squeezing them tightly on a fishing line. What do you think this is?

Says right on it - 'Fish Gripper'. Instead of a jaw holder like we use today, this goes around the body of the fish to hold it and keep your hands slime-free.

After googling it looks like an old tool for gripping the whole fish by its body, not the mouth. 

1 minute ago, MN Fisher said:

Says right on it - 'Fish Gripper'. Instead of a jaw holder like we use today, this goes around the body of the fish to hold it and keep your hands slime-free.

That's what the name implies but from the design it did not look like that. It looks like it would do a number on a fish!

5 minutes ago, pauldconyers said:

That's what the name implies but from the design it did not look like that. It looks like it would do a number on a fish!

Well, it was primarily for panfish that you'd toss in a pail (metal, they didn't have plastic pails back then) so you could take them home for eatin'...so they weren't too worried about crushing damage cause it was going to be gutted and fried anyway.

It is fish gripper that popular in Asian, mostly for those type of mackerel fish. Ideally for those you can’t lip and might have sharp splines. I don’t like it for catch and released.

 

Fish gripper - the pliers part, well, for holding the fish.

The teeth part (where is actually says Fish Gripper) is the descaler part.

Catch and release wasn't a thing back then and you didn't want to drop your catch ?‍♂️

Yep, it's an old med-evil device used to grip fish in the most painful way. They were usually sold with a "fish stretching rack" use for lengthening a fish to braggin' size. All the split-shot was for adding weight, inserted with a "long-neck weight funnel". You could also get the "pendulum decapitator"

We used to use one very similar to that one to clamp the tail of a fish and then descale it before fileting it up.  It was way better than the board with the weaker clamp.

Hang it in the man cave/gal cave. Interesting piece of history.