spider rigging help - from kayak

[wahanlin]

Hey folks. I went out yesterday after reading a bunch about spider rigging, and decided to have a go myself. I did ok, ended up catching a two keeper crappie, several bass, a little yellow bass, and a blue cat. I was blessed to have little wind. I learned a lot but realized I have many more questions.

The biggest question I have relates to rod length. I was only trolling with two rods to get the hang of it. One was a 12' two piece B'n'M rod with a b&m quick change crappie reel on it, and one was a 6' firm baitcasting rod with med action reel. I am fishing primarily from a kayak right now, and even when the water was pretty still I still bobbed up and down a good bit. It looked to me like the 12 foot rod rose and fell much more with the water action than the 6 foot rod did. I caught all of my crappie on the longer rod, and more of the other fish on the shorter rod. Do longer rods help to counter act the movement of the boat, keeping the bait in one place longer? It was easier to work with the shorter rod but i'm wondering if my bait was bouncing up and down a lot more with it.

what is the average number of rods kayak spider riggers use? I want to move up to using at least 3 if not 4.

I am using one of the piranha max humminbird portable depth/fish finders in my yak. It was very helpful yesterday in locating schools of fish, and I was even able to see some schools of baitfish which I had not before seen on my particular fish finder. Have any of you developed tips for reading the older style 2d depthfinders, as far as figuring out what kinds of fish you're looking at? I passed through a school of what looked like crappie and caught a little spotted bass, and realized I had no idea what fish I was looking at. Sometimes fish all about the same size would appear spread up and down over a few feet in the water column, but more often when I was catching fish, my fish finder was showing what looked more like lines of fish all right around the same depth.

I had no way of knowing how fast I was going. I was using a capps/coleman style rig with a 1/2 oz egg sinker, and was watching my lines to make sure they were relatively straight down. In hindsight it seemed to me like I caught the most fish when I was nearly still.
Do yall think it would be worth it to invest in a handheld gps with speed readings? I would love to upgrade to a depthfinder with side imaging and gps tracking, but that ain't in the cards for a while.

Lastly, I missed a bunch of fish. Particularly at first, before I got a feeling for what the bite would be like. One reason was because that quick-change reel had no brake. But even on the other rod, I felt a tap and would set the hook, to no avail. I think i missed as many crappie as I caught yesterday. Any advice on what to sense for a bite?

Thanks for any info, sorry the post is so long

[bfish]

You might want to ask on the kayak forum.

I would think the longer rods would actually bounce more distance than the shorter rods. Of course, the longer rods gets the lures further away from the boat. Myself, I don't like anything longer than about 9 ft in a kayak (but I don't spiderrig from a kayak either).

Handheld gps will work, but some don't read below 0.5 mph. If you are brave enough, I am sure there are cell phone apps that will give gps speed too.

[jimp]

check out the yak forum here, someone got some custom made hitek holders made for their yak, they seemed pleased with the results.

[wahanlin]

thanks for the help guys. Its a fun learning process