Trolling

[tiger9297]

Hello, i have been crappie fishing all my life but Im new to crappie.com and to trolling. I understand the concept of trolling but i am wondering how you know how deep your lures are running?

[Moose1am]

I slow troll for crappie using jigs and a drop shot weight. I go about 0.5 mph or less using the electric trolling motor to maintain position over a brush pile or a drop off. I fish vertically and at a depth down to 26ft or so. The lake I fish has a thermocline in the summertime so the fish stay above the thermocline as there is not much dissolved oxygen below the thermcline. So therefore I only fish above the thermcline. Most of the fish are along dropoffs where there is some wood.

Now I am thinking about doing some faster trolling for crappie that are suspended in open water. (Confined Open Water) What I am going to do is patrol the area using the depth finder. I am going to look for schools of fish that are suspended above the bottom. Crappie will tend to group together in the Summer time and during the Cold winter time in large schools. They won't be too far from their feeding groups. I find my crappie about 50 to 100ft away from my creek channel drop offs suspended over the deeper water. The crappie only have to travel about 100ft horizontally to reach the top shelf of the drop off where they can feed. They will go into the shallower water during the early morning hours and late evening hours when the sun is at a lower angle to the earth. Then during the daytime they swim back out and suspend in deeper water at around 10 to 12ft below the surface. So in my case I will see the schools suspended about 12ft down. So I want my lures to run right at 11 or 12ft down from the surface. Now how to get the crank bait to the right depth. Well you can troll a crank bait behind the boat and go into an area that is 12ft deep and start letting out line until you can feel the crank bait just touching the bottom every once in a while. Try picking a good clean bottom area where you won't get snagged. Then mark the line with a line counter or a black magic marking pen so that you can repeat the same amount of line being out behind the boat when you fish your spots. I use a cheap shakesphere line counter that I picked up at Wal-Mart. BPS also sells these. You simply clip it onto your rod and screw the thumb screw tight. Then run the line though the slot in the device and flip a lever over to catch the line in the slot. Then adjust the tension on the devise and set the line counter to zero with the line all reeled into where the lure is at the very tip end of the rod. Now let the lure out behind the boat and let out the same amount of line that you used in your testing in the 12 ft deep area. Your lure should now be running at 12ft deep. Things to also remember which are very important. Use the same lures each time in the testing and when you are actually fishing. Use the same DIAMETER line and TYPE Of line. Changing line diamter or density will effect the depth that the lure runs. Use the same boat speed each time. If you go faster when fishing than you did in your testing the depths will vary. I use my GPS unit and record the speed during the testing.

Note you can test in 12ft water for example or in 10ft water or in any depth. Just make sure that you record all the various factors. (Line type and diameter, boat speed, lure type and amount of line let out behind the boat).

Make a chart and put it in a plastic three ring notebook. Laminate the paper so that it won't be ruined if it gets wet. Or just memorize the numbers of the chart.

Most of the time during the summer time the fish will suspend above the bottom of the lake. But they may suspend around standing timber and then you will have a hard time trolling a crank bait though the timber without getting snagged. Might try slow trolling (barely moving) with weedless jigs on a drop shot rig. That way you can still fish the trees and not get snagged up so often. Fish Suspended in the trees may be more agressive and bite faster than those that are out in open water resting.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Fast trolling works for lots of fish. In Canada they use spash guards on the back of the boats so that they can troll backwards with the big motors. Nowdays they have other devised that slow the boat's gasoline motors down so they may troll in the forward position these days. Even at idle speed an onld 20hp Mercury Outboard motor idled too fast for slow trolling minnows for walleyes. We turn the boat around and trolled backwards to get even slower speeds. Up at Eagle Lake in Ontario the bottom is solid rock and gravel mostly with reeds growing in the shallow water and submergent vegetation growing down to 15ft deep since the water was very clear. Not much mud up there on the Canadian Shield Rock as compared to here in Southern IN. The Glaciers removed all that soil and moved it down south from Canada.

And Buck Perry is a big believer in trolling SpoonPlugs for Largemouth bass and other species of fish. He wrote a book on SpoonPluging which I have but have not read entirely. It's falling apart right now from old age. LOL It's a paperback version so that is why. Dad read the entire book and marked with red ink all the important parts. Dad was a school teacher LOL. He always used Red Ink to grade the students homework papers. Dad was also a very good fisherman who taught me a lot about fishing for bass and other species.

Once I used Bucks methods at Kentucky Lake. I only tried it once out on the main lake on a calmn hot summer day. I trolled in an area where Buck predicted would be good. An intersection of a creek with the old TN river channel. I had only been trolling for about 5 to 10 minutes and was feeling my spoonplug bouncing along the bottom and hitting every once in a while. So I had the depth right at the time. I hooked into a big LM bass right away. He threw the Spoonplug after he jumped several times which was why I could tell he was a big bass. I estimate it was between 4 and 6 lbs or maybe bigger. He was back away from my boat as I let out a lot of line. The water was deep there (about 25ft deep at the top of the ledge that formed the creek channel) Even though I lost that bass I felt that I had proved that Buck Perry's methods were sound. Finding and hooking a bass in just 5 minutes proved to me that trolling works. I was by myself that day and I was much younger then. I was not really liking fishing by myself. Dad was taking his afternoon map as we always did. That day I was not sleepy even thought we got up at 4 am that morning and I decided to go out and fish my way. Dad knew all about Buck Perry but never wanted to adapt new ways of fishing. He always wanted to fish with crankbaits at the old spots where he and his old fishing partner had always caught lots of big bass.

Here is a picture of some of the bass that they caught back in the late 1950's

Hello, i have been crappie fishing all my life but Im new to crappie.com and to trolling. I understand the concept of trolling but i am wondering how you know how deep your lures are running?