Putting it all together:
I was originally asked by a fellow member of Crappie Dot Com to come up with an explanation on how to effectively utilize the Off Shore Tadpoles while trolling. Unfortunately, fishing tournaments, normal work, a business, and hunting season all slowed the process of this article. I’m sorry it took so long to finally put pen to paper and finish what I started so many months ago.
It is mid-August, the temperature here in Michigan is a balmy 90 degrees. As I pull out of the harbor I take note of the water temperature on my Lowrance HDS 10. The surface temperature reads 85.4 degrees! The local kids are enjoying the cooling effects of the water as they play in the beach area. I know I need to find cooler water if I’m going to come up with enough fish for a fish fry.
I accelerate my Suzuki and soon I have my Alumacraft Competitor cruising at 45 miles per hour. The breeze feels good on my SPF 1 million lathered skin. After traversing through four different channels and five different lakes I finally reach my destination.
I assume the crappies will be hiding in the shade under the lily pad field at the Northwestern edge of the lake. I turn on my side scan sonar and slowly cruise past the pads. It doesn’t take long to decide that the crappies are not here. Where are they? I move out in to the main channel of the lake where the depths reach nearly forty feet. I take notice of the surface temperature again; 79 degrees. The water is much cooler out here. Slowly, hooks start to appear on my screen. Some of them coming at a depth of thirty feet, some as high as ten feet below the surface of the water. With such a wide depth range, today is the perfect day to troll some planer boards for crappies!
This lake is crystal clear and I’ve had very little luck pushing jigs, long lining jigs, or straight trolling lipped crank baits. The fish are spooked by the boat long before my offering finds them. I turn my boat into the wind and set my Minn Kota Terrova 80 at 1 mile per hour. I make sure to set my auto pilot so that I am aimed right down the middle of the deepest section of the lake. I want to know what those fish are down around thirty feet and suspended a little more than ten feet off the bottom. Knowing the light doesn’t penetrate as well, I want a bigger profile bait to attract bigger fish. One that makes a little noise would also be nice. I select a Berkley size 4 Flicker shad. I affix it to an Off Shore Tackle OR36 1 Tadpole behind a 4 foot leader. Utilizing my Precision Trolling app, I know that it will take 49 feet of line to reach my depth. Because a flicker minnow will dive slightly behind the Tadpole, I played out 45 feet of line. I then attached it to my OR12 planer board with tattle flag and sent the whole offering out the port side of my boat. Before I could even get it in to position, the tattle flag started dancing. This indicated that a fish was hooked on my offering. I reeled this in and was rewarded with a 13 ½ inch crappie. A fine way to start the evening.
Over the next two hours the above scenario would play out time and time again. I was only able to get two rods in the water. One of them being my flicker shad offering and the other being a floating jig head on a three foot leader with a two inch Big Bite Shad as bait. I was running this setup at fifteen feet down or exactly twenty feet of line played out from my OR36 Tadpole to my rod tip.
I boated thirty four fish this evening. Without the aid of Off Shore Tackle OR36 Tadpoles, there was little chance for me to get my bait into position and know exactly how deep my baits were running. There are other ways to get a bait down to the specific distance I was targeting. One requires a massive amount of line out to reach the target depth. Others require drop weights, sinkers, and a ton of guess work to hit a target depth. There was zero guess work with this setup. I knew exactly how deep the fish were and exactly how far I needed to run my Tadpoles in order to reach that depth.
Trolling for crappies has grown in popularity over the last few years. Many anglers are adapting to the utilization of planer boards in order to spread out their lines and get them away from the boat. One of the biggest issues when tournament fishing is time. You cannot get it back. Every time I have to let a crankbait out a hundred or more feet in order to reach a target depth, time is lost. I would much rather let out 20 feet of line to achieve that same depth! The OR36 Tadpole helps me achieve the depths I am looking for with the least amount of line played out in order to reach that depth. Over the course of a day, I might be able to get that same bait into the water thirty or forty times more than the same guy running a hundred feet lead. Hopefully, that extra time in the water equates to more fish in the box!