I feel like a total moron tonight…. This is my first year in walleye and had some success trolling with some new gear…. At the beginning of the year I got a few okuma downrigger rods w/ Magda 20 reels. Seem to be decent reels and rods to start out with ( im a musky casting guy and have top of the line musky gear, I had little intention to buy really good walleye stuff when it doesn’t need to be bullet proof. It just can’t be junk). So the first question is- are these trash?
Here’s when I become a moron… I didn’t realize that line counter reels needed to be calibrated…. By under filling a reel and cause a dramatic difference in what line is actually out, and what the line is counting… the reels count the revolutions of the spool, not line out… so all summer I have had to constantly add line, add line, add line to go deeper to catch my fish… I thought nothing of it and would routinely need to be at 210ft out to catch fish…. I was referencing many different dipsey charts only to be totally off.. which made me not trust the charts… so the last two trips out I have 100% committed to the chart numbers….
Anyway, tonight I did a test to see what 50ft on a tape measure looked like compared to the number on my line counter reel… 85ft…… WOW.
Yesterday I caught a nice 27” walleye 61ft of line out on a 3 dipsey… and my chart said I should have been 25ft down….. when in reality I measured my line counter’s 61ft, and it turned out to be 37ft of line… that means that my bait was actually 16ft down…. So I am ordering line now and will be adding quite a bit of line to my spools…. Or should I just toss these things and get something else and calibrate the reels accordingly?
I thought I would share to help someone out because I feel lucky to have caught as many fish as I did this year, but also annoyed that I have been missing my depth by over 50% the entire year… no wonder I had such a hard time targeting 40ft fish…. I just couldn’t do it…. But when they were high, man I was smoking them! LOL…
….Sigh….
