Trolling
Keeping It Simple (And Short)
Trolling is actually very easy. Apart from your normal casting
equipment all you need is a boat. And off you go: let out the lure and drive
off. All you need to do now is to catch some fish.
Where And How?
The first questions you'll be asking is where to go and how fast.
There's a lot of talk about trolling the open water, but in most (deep) lakes
you'll be better of staying close to the shore. You won't usually be as close to
the shore as when you cast, but there's always some fish staying a bit away from
the shore and the obvious structure. The speed can be quite fast in my
experience, the most important thing being that the
lures work well at the speed you're going.
You shouldn't just go in a bees line at a regular pace. Very successful is to
take a rod in hand and actively present the
lure with twitches and jerks or slower movements. When you're rowing or fishing
with more than one rod you'll have to fix the rods somehow to the boat. There
are lot of rod holders for this purpose and they are not all good. If you don't
have one you'll find a way of jamming the rod between the boat and a heavy piece
of equipment (rucksack, tank, box, anchor, etc), but be careful: the line
and the rod blank shouldn't make contact with hard or sharp stuff which could
damage them.
Lure And Depth
One of the best lure types for trolling are
plugs (minnows and crankbaits),
but you can use any lure as long as you adjust your speed and take precautions
against line twist (thinking of in line spinners) by mounting an eccentric
weight in front of the lure. The big advantage of plugs is, that their
running depth is quite easy to
predict and control. And there's another important question: how deep should I
troll? Keeping close to the bottom is seldom wrong, especially when you're near
the shore and not deeper than about 10m. But you have to experiment and it's
best to have several lures with different diving depths, although I do have a
tendency to go with rather deep diving ones. But it is very well possible to
catch fish with a lure diving to 4m over 20 or
30m of water and away from the shore.
My impression is that when you're trolling it's much more important to find the
right lure, than when you're casting. Probably because you don't present the
lure so close to the fishes mouth and the whole presentation tends to be more
monotonous.
How Much Line Is Out?
If you want to bring a Plug to a determined depth, you'll have
to know how much line you're letting out. I don't have a line counter but do a
rough estimate in the following way: while the boat is running I point the rod
tip in direction to the lure while blocking the line, then I let the line go and
snap the rod backwards until it's in a right angle to the line and then
immediately block the line again and slowly point the rod tip back at the lure
again. I assume that with every backward pull of the rod I let out about a rods
length of line.
More Equipment
The first additional piece of equipment I'd always want when
trolling is a fish finder. First of all
to avoid snags and to know just how close I can go to a steep shore.
Although I have to say that it hasn't always proven very successful to go as
close to the shore as the diving depth of your lures allow because the fish seem
to stand a bit away from the shore a lot. The fish finder will also give you
clues which depth range might be successful at all and where the fish are more
concentrated. But beware that fish standing shallow will often not show up on
the fish finder ( because they don't come into cone of sound waves) and you
should give shallow running lures a try even without any signals on your fish
finder. Don't just concentrate on signals of big fish, schools of bait fish are
at least as important.
Deeper Down To The Fish
If you've been trolling for a while you'll develop two wishes:
getting the lures deeper down and spreading them farther out to cover more water
in a single pass.
For additional depth you could use downrigger or a diver. The downrigger is a
heavy chunk of lead which is let down on a steel cable. on the lead or the cable
there is clip into which you can fix you're line (you could also use thin rubber
bands or even pieces of light line). So now the line runs from our rod more or
less straight down to the big lead and from there horizontally to the lure. If a
fish bites the connection of the fishing line to the downrigger should break and
you can fight the fish unimpaired by heavy lead weights.
The diver or paravan is a simpler equipment. There are few variation but
basically they all work like a big diving lip on a plug. Some are hung into the
line, others are tied to the line and are followed by leader with the lure
attached. The deeper they go, the stronger is the pull they will put on your rod
and you'll want to use an extra heavy rod for them. The depth you can reach is
limited, but with the right model and size you should be able to reach 20m.
Wider
If you want to cover a broader area when trolling you will need
a planer board which makes the lure run sideways of the boat. These boards swim
on the water and are attached to the line in such a way that they veer out when
you pull them, being able to run up to 50 Meter sideways of the boat. There are
two basic ways of using them: either you attach them straight to you fishing
line, that's usually called an inline planer board or they are attached to a
mast with a line of there own, the fishing line is then attached with a clip
similar as to a down rigger. Traditional models in the alpine region have so
called "Zügel", attached directly to the planer line without using a
rod at all. For the inline models you will also need a heavier rod because they
work with water pressure just like the divers. Apart from the advantage of
covering a larger area we've now also got better chances to catch boat shy fish
and can go very close to the shore with a shallow diving lure.
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