Advice Needed on Unders in deeper water

Caught a few unders in deeper water (18-23 feet). I hooked them fairly and got the hook out just fine but noticed like 3 of them just would not revive after getting the hook out. They just went on their side dead after getting the hook out. I tried to revive each of them for about 10 minutes to no avail. I felt terrible that these 9 7/8" crappie just keeled over. Any advice on how to get these fish back in the water healthy?

Reel them up slow ,to give them time to decompress .

i did same thing yesterday 21' deep. 3 but they were 13". i think its the quick change in water temp from deep to shallow that kills them.i have better luck if i release them right away instead of putting them in the live well running full bore. or combination of both!

This, let'em swim around about half the way up, reel slowly.

I have put em in my dip net and pushed it as far down in the water as I could and it helped some revive.

Two of the GOATers in CAT early on taught us to throw the fish high in the air to let it get smacked when hitting the water. For some reason, it seems to wake them up and/or deflate the air bladder or something. I do not usually have this problem with deep fish because of the way I reel them up but when I do, I find this air ball approach to work most times. I do this after I have tried to revived the fish like some of the approaches mentioned above.

I aint doing that,...duh.

Reeling up slower will help the problem.
Jimmy's suggestion will work. May seem like a "duh" but the fish will take off to deeper water. Used this technique many times with winter fish that come from deep water. They all swim off and don't float back up.

I will have to try the tossing em in the air technique sometime! At Sandlin this year we were catching fish so fast we didn't have time to mess with them. I threw one head down in a minnow bucket a couple minutes while getting everything rigged back out and by the time I went to release him he took off! Did that the rest of the day and didn't have any floaters!

At Sandlin is where I had one floating. I scooped it up in the net and started moving it around down deeper and it took off out of the net.
Todd F, I didn't know you ever caught any unders

I've read this in a few articles and it has worked well for me although some that don't know take offense to me actually throwing the fish back.... they don't know well cause they just don't know.....LOL
I release almost all my throw backs this way....

[quote=Hickory Nut
Todd F, I didn't know you ever caught any unders [/quote]

Who said anything about unders? We was worried about going over our limit so we were throwing the little 1.4s and 1.5s back!!!

Paul and I have both used thjs technique for years. Works almost everytime

Like I said, two of the GOATers in CAT and Texas… corrected!