Side Trolling

I've saw people mount a trolling motor on the side of their boat for pulling poles but what's everyone's opinion on pushing poles this way?

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I think the boat would be in the way a lot, unless you're using a lot of weight and your line angle is close to perpendicular. Crappie come to the surface a lot, you'd need to drag them under the boat, which would be a challenge.

It would work better if you had the rods angled on either end of the boat, but at that point it's not really pushing anymore.

I am retro fitting a 14' stick steer for the same reason. I'll let you know in a couple months

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I think side trolling is has its place for sure. If fishing deeper water with a good bit of weight side trolling is good. If fishing shallow I think pushing is better. Just my opinion. YouTube Brad whitehead. He’s a guide and side pulls, he flat out catches them.

I do it but only in deep water. I only use 4 at a time to avoid a bad situation. Heavy weight is needed. I still prefer side pulling though. It allows me to view on the Garmin what type of structure is coming up before my jigs get there. :twocents

Side pulling is big here on Pickwick where I fish mostly I know several guys that do it and do pretty good. I don’t know that it’s and more successful than just regular pulling and friend of mine guides here using that method and usually fills the livewell for his clients but I’ve never heard of pushing sideways but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work unless it was windy then it might be a problem.


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used to do it all the time out of a 12 ft john boat, caught a lot of big crappie and channel cat doing it. made a plate to mount trolling motor to side of boat.

This is my tm mount
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I have a 14' aluminum boat that was setup for this when fishing shallow water. I will say it is harder to control pushing than it is pulling. It took some experimenting on where to locate the trolling motor as well. I turn the big motor to aide in some guiding of the boat. We have loaded the boat this way when others were struggling. With the 14' boat we were able to push a wider path than pushing just out of the front.

[emoji121]what he said. Especially regarding boat control.
When possible I prefer to drift with the wind and only use the tm in bursts for direction correction.

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