How deep do you troll?

[eyedaddy]

When I used to troll from my power boat we would run 6 to eight lines and they would be from 40 feet back to 150-200 feet back all with different weights. I also had a Great Rod handler/Fishing Partner with me who really knew what he was doing. There were very few times we got skunked but we were always in deep water.

[Frankthefitter]

I use the same trolling chart I've always used on my boat and it catches fish. I've been mainly in the ships channel in the Easter shore side.


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[Frankthefitter]

This is the chart I've always used it's very proven. George Pieper made it. He has lots of good rockfish info floating around the Internet. He used to have a web page but I think it's shut down.


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[Yak Fish]

This is the chart I've always used it's very proven. George Pieper made it. He has lots of good rockfish info floating around the Internet. He used to have a web page but I think it's shut down.


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So that chart is for a Tony Spoon?

[Frankthefitter]

I think that is primarily Bucktails and parachutes. I'm not certain though. Years ago I had a Tony Accetta chart that came with a spoon. I bet they are on the internet somewhere. Spoons are another science because of how they are tuned and rigged. I've had Tony Accetta's and stretch 25's foul and tangle a whole trolling spread. It doesn't take much for them to travel up, down or sideways.


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[Frankthefitter]

George Pieper wrote this testing different style lines with spoons

"The development in the last few years of very strong, very thin and essentially non-stretching fishing lines provides fishermen with new alternatives to the monofilament, wire, and lead-core trolling lines that we used in the past. The new lines have great advantages. They are extremely sensitive because they do not stretch the way monofilament does and they do not kink and sometimes break the way wire does. And, in addition to being tough and abrasion resistant, they are very thin which means they are subject to less drag and can take lures to a greater depth with less weight.

Many years ago I became interested in the question of how deep trolling lures run when they are pulled behind a fishing boat. I ran a number of lures at different speeds in a tow tank in the hydrodynamics laboratory of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and measured the drag and lift forces exerted by the lures as they were pulled through the water. Starting with these forces, I then applied the laws of fluid dynamics to the leader, in-line sinker and main line to write a computer program that can calculate how deep each of these lures would run.

THE NEW LINES

The main lines for which results were obtained in 1993 were 40lb test monofilament, 0.020-inch diameter wire and a 35lb test lead core. Now through the courtesy of their manufacturers and engineering representatives, I have gotten the necessary constants (line diameter and linear density) to apply the program to a number of new lines: 35lb test Spectron, 30 and 50lb test Fireline and 30,40, 50 and 60 lb test Spider Wire main lines.

The program uses a Tony 21, 19 or 18 spoon, a Crippled Alewive 11/0, 9/0 or 7/0 or a surgical hose lure, attached to a 30-foot, 40lb test monofilament leader, and in-line sinker and a main line. It is able select from eleven different main lines, seven different lures, an in-line sinker of adjustable weight, and any desired boat speed and main line length. In fact, the only thing not currently adjustable is the 30ft 40lb test mono leader and that could be changed too, if necessary.

With such flexibility in the program, it¹s easy to get swamped with results. It turns out that the same approaches to using the data that I had previously developed are still valid today. To take account of boat speed, for all lines, sinker depth at 2.5mph is 1.3 times that at 3mph and at 3.5mph it is 0.8 times that at 3mph. Heavy lures like a Tony 21 or Crippled Alewife 11/0 will run about three feet below the sinker depth while a light bucktail (~2 oz.) or surgical hose will be only be about one foot deeper.

It is also true that the accurate linear relationships between sinker depth and sinker weight for line lengths between 50 and 200 ft that I found for the monofilament and wire lines worked with earlier, also apply individually to all the new lines. So it is possible to simply extend the trolling depths chart that I wrote back in 1993 to the new lines to again answer the question, ³If there are fish at some depth on the meter, what combination of the line length and sinker weight should I use to get that depth?² Results are given in the Trolling Lure Depth Table for 40lb test monofilament, 0.020 inch diameter wire, 35lb test lead core, 35lb test Spectron, 30 and 50lb test FireLine and 30,40, 50 and 60lb test Spider Wire main lines. Line diameters, either measured or obtained from the manufacturer are also given for each line type.

TROLLING LURE DEPTH TABLE
The Trolling Lure Depth Table tells what combinations of line length and sinker weight to use to reach the desired depth for a series of depths at 5 foot intervals. Main line length is measured from the sinker to where the line breaks the water¹s surface behind the boat. A boat speed of 3mph is assumed and a standard 2ft of depth is taken for leader and lure, to be adjusted for the kind of lure. The resultant sinker weights are rounded off to the nearest ounce.

Some observations: 1) The Spider Wires, being the thinnest, get deeper with less sinker weight than the other lines. The Spider Wires are also very close to each other in the weight needed to achieve a given depth as the line strength is changed by 10lb increments. There would not seem to be much point in using more that one strength of Spider Wire for a number of trolling rods. 2) The FireLines behave similarly to the Spider Wires, but require a few (usually three to five) more ounces of sinker weight to reach the same depth. Thirty-five pound Spectron is very close to 30lb test FireLine, usually within one ounce. 3) All the new lines are qualitatively different from the lead core and wire line, and good old monofilament is in a class by itself because it is so lightweight and has comparatively such a large diameter that it takes a lot of weight to get it down with the others. On the other hand, it is the only one that can keep your lures at ten feet or less with more than 50 feet of line out, unless you go to zero sinker weight, and then the depth achieved depends much more strongly on the lure type than it does with a sinker weight greater than zero."



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