Unpredictable environmental fluctuations are a major problem in fisheries. To mitigate these uncertainties, reserves are advocated to help ensure population persistence, reduce population and harvest variance and to provide a ‘hedge’ against management failures. Using recent insights from the modelling of marine reserves that indicate that reserves can generate a ‘win-win’ in terms of economic payoffs and ecological benefits, we propose a six-step process for managing reserves with uncertainty and argue in favour of initially establishing less than desirable reserve sizes where stakeholder resistance to reserves may be preventing their implementation.