So we used 9 poles 3 people with no fish hawk. We have two downriggers that we use even in shallow water. The nice thing with the downriggers is you can see on the sonar how deep the ball is running and it is so fast to change depth. I do sometimes run bandits off the downriggers but need to account for lure pull down. So if I let my bandit out 75ft then clip it to the ball and let it down 15 FT I will be fishing 31 ft down if this makes sense.