Quote Originally Posted by fishhawk2700 View Post
Your statement about seeing big boards out 80 YARDS is not possible. The distance you can let your boards out IMO is determined by two things. First, the height above the water of the source of your main line, and second is the efficiency of your boards. Once your main line to your boards starts to hang in the water you WILL have major issues. With that being said, on most days I will run five rods a side and I will only need about 60'. I can run seven a side but even at that I only run about 75'. Much more than that and the main line starts to drag. Five inline boards will take about the same width as my big boards with five lines.
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?...