New Member- trolling questions

[wakina]

First let me say there is nothing wrong with the inline wts system for catching fish! I used it for years with great results. It still works pretty much issue free in deep open water. Now with that being said there are some advantages to the Tru-trip divers and the jet divers. The most notable advantage is when you are fishing in shallow water over rocky bottom such as the reefs.

If running inline wts and you leave out enough line to target fish at the 15ft depth and the water is only 20 ft deep there is is a very good chance that the inside rods on a turn will slow down enough to allow the wt to sink and make contact with the rocky bottom often resulting in a snag. If you do snag and have to stop then you either have to hurry up and retrieve the rest of your lines before they can make contact with the bottom and possibly snagging another 1 or more of your lines or you have to keep going and try to break off the snagged line.

The Tru-trips and Jets will either become neutrally buoyant or actually start to float to the surface making a snag less likely. With a Tru-Trip 40 it takes roughly 23 to 24 ft of line back from the inline board to reach a depth of 14 ft. to get to the 20 to 22 ft depth you would have to leave out about 52 to 53 ft of line assuming you are using line in the 10lb Mono diameter.

I use only the Tru-Trip 40 divers and have replaced all of my Jet 40 divers with the Tru-Trip 40s. The trip mechanism is more reliable on the Tru-Trips than the jet 40 which turns over from the wt of the fish and planes to the surface with the fish in tow. I only use the TT40 divers because they get deeper faster without as much line out as the TT-30s and Jet 40s they also don't pull to hard for my inline boards like the TT-50s do.

I usually start harness fishing as soon as the water gets to the 40 degree mark. There have been several tournaments won by worm fishermen in the early spring even while the jig bite is still going strong. I fish mostly harnesses and spoons from the 40 degree water temp mark to the end of the season. I do catch some large fish but do not target them specifically. I like to say that I target walleyes and whatever bites and gets to the net goes into the cooler so long as it is of legal size.

[MasterKraft]

There were still quite a few boats jigging around turtle while I was getting 2 man limits driftin/castin. It was definitely at the end of the jig bite though, early may. We each had a rod draggin bottom bouncers with homemade crawler/spinner harnesses and castin parrish peas and erie dearies. The old fashioned way, I know, but I don't have the boat to set up for trollin. We did pretty good in that area for a few weeks between turtle and harbor light. No fish ohios but we caught some nice fish. Not bad for being as west as west can be.