Tried trolling for the first time yesterday!

Well I gave it a shot, ran four lines with inline planers and spoons. I never got around to calibrating my rods so not sure of the accuracy of my counters. But anyway...we fished for a couple hours towards the end of the day Saturday and caught one walleye and a bunch of white bass. It was fun and even though I had my son and wife with me, I was busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. More mentally busy I guess trying to figure this stuff out.

Anyways...had to share this because I'm pretty excited about trying it out again!
I can't thank Dave from Dreamcatcher Bait enough for answering all the countless questions I had and the more I still have.

Get out your credit card, welcome to your new addiction. Congrats.
We saw a group of guys who I can only guess must be new to trolling, as they were casting out as far as they could, then putting an inline board on the line... Way to much work and how do you repeat.

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Originally Posted by ebijack

Get out your credit card, welcome to your new addiction. Congrats.
We saw a group of guys who I can only guess must be new to trolling, as they were casting out as far as they could, then putting an inline board on the line... Way to much work and how do you repeat.

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maybe they didn't have line counters and found something that was working for then.

I fished the western basin for many yrs without line counters. we just fed out line until we were happy and stuck them in a rod holder. we caught lots of fish this way. we ran 2 rods out the side and 2 off each corner and 2 on my homemade outriggers and 2 downriggers. we ran hot-n-tots and wally divers on the flat lines and run wiggle warts on the out riggers. if one bait was hotter than the rest we would switch all the lures to that one. then we ran worm harnesses on the downriggers. but we were always changing out a couple of lures with any crank bait that was in our boxes. a few trips we did good on mud bugs running them back about 200 ft give or take 50 ft. trolling is not that hard its finding the fish this way that can be a little hard. but we had a lot of fun and usually caught plenty of fish.

then we moved over to the central basin and line counters were a must. we started by going out on a charter that had line counters and he run 6 dipsy divers and run wire off his big planer boards. one trip and I was hooked on the central basin. I believe we actually caught more fish on the western basin, but we get bigger fish on the central basin.

Before using line counters we just stood in the middle of the boat, point your rod tip at the back corner, lightly spool out line while you point to the front of the boat. That was close to 20 ft. ( half way was 10 ft) Repeat as many times as required.

We used to watch the line guide and pre measured how much line went out for each pass across the spool.