Following A Boat Trolling

[fishhawk2700]

80 yards might be pushing it a bit, however, I used to run my big boards out 150-200 feet when trolling for Steelhead out of Wheatley and Erieau. I used a 6 foot mast at the front of my boat that kept the line nice and high. There was rarely ever a boat within 1/4 mile of us, so having enough room to troll was almost never ever an issue. Years ago I switched to mostly dipseys & riggers, but when we do put out boards, we now use in-lines. We will sometimes run those out 200-250 feet from the boat. We set the clickers to "on" and set the drag very light so that we can hear them click when a fish hits. I wouldn't run them out that far when trolling in traffic, but that's the beauty of fishing in Canada. Not much traffic, eh?...

Why would you want to run your boards (big or small) that far out. I will add 30' if I'm running riggers and/or divers but at most I'm at between 100 and 120 tops. At 200 to 250 it will take you almost a 1/4 mi to turn around. I have physically measured my distances on my board line and anything approaching 100', with any kind of chop, has your main line with a huge "bow" in it and in the water periodically. Now add to that the wind blows your line from rod tip to release all over the place. It's bad enough with the boards on a short leash when it's rough out and you have the bigger waves grabbing your PB line. People used to pay me to catch walleye and my philosophy is to keep my baits as close to the boat as I can and still maintain an acceptable catch rate. All I can say is that everyone has their own program to run. Whatever works for you, go for it.

[slimshady]

Why would you want to run your boards (big or small) that far out. I will add 30' if I'm running riggers and/or divers but at most I'm at between 100 and 120 tops. At 200 to 250 it will take you almost a 1/4 mi to turn around. I have physically measured my distances on my board line and anything approaching 100', with any kind of chop, has your main line with a huge "bow" in it and in the water periodically. Now add to that the wind blows your line from rod tip to release all over the place. It's bad enough with the boards on a short leash when it's rough out and you have the bigger waves grabbing your PB line. People used to pay me to catch walleye and my philosophy is to keep my baits as close to the boat as I can and still maintain an acceptable catch rate. All I can say is that everyone has their own program to run. Whatever works for you, go for it.

First off, I almost always troll downwind and run back up, so turning around isn't an issue. This is also why I never use my big boards anymore (too much of a pain to bring in and out all the time). With in-line boards, I don't have to worry about the bow in the line. This past fall we noticed that our outside boards were getting almost all the bites and they were running about 150 feet out. So we pushed everything out so that our inside boards were 100, then 150 and 200 for the outsides and we started getting fish on all of them, but the outsides were still the hottest. That particular day, the water was on the clear side, the fish were up high and it was pretty calm. So getting them really far from the boat seemed to be the difference. Some of my buddies were struggling that day until I told them how we were getting them and then they started getting them too. Like I said, I wouldn't do that in traffic, but when the space allows, I will if i need to. My "normal" set up would be 50/100/150 on most days. Adjust from there.

The last couple times I had other guys fishing with me, I set mine up like I normally do and they had their's much closer and much tighter together. After about the first 4 or 5 fish on "my" side, I noticed they moved their's out too, then both sides were about even after that....the power of observation...