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Posts: 164
Location: Bloomington,MN | I haven't done much open water trolling but want to start doing it more. How do you go about it? Do you drive around til you find bait fish? What are prime water temps for this technique? And lastly how fast do you troll?
Edited by rumbler 4/23/2013 8:09 PM
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Location: Green Bay, WI | Troll at the same speeds you would troll at in shallower water. It's the depth that you care about--and that's a factor of the amount of line out...not necessarily of speed. If your lures work well at 3-4 mph in 10' of water, they'll work just the same at 3-4 mph in 50 feet of water (or 1000 feet of water).
As for strategy in open water, it's also the same in many cases: Find structure. It might be a mid-basin hump that tops out at 20 feet in the middle of a 40 foot basin, or it might be much more subtle than that. It might even be, and this is the hardest one for me, a school of forage! So now you have to try to identify that forage amongst all that open water. Talk about a needle in a haystack!
(See the value of side imaging yet?)
TB
Edited by tcbetka 4/23/2013 8:16 PM
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| Also look for balls of forage fish on your electronics, and troll through, under, over and around, but make sure your lures are above, not below the Muskies, they feed up and can swim 10' to 15' with a couple of kicks of their tail. If you can, run one line right in the prop wash, we catch a lot of fish there. We troll as slow as 2 and as fast as 5-6, depends if your lures will stay in the water and not blow out. Don't be afraid to troll Cowgirls, just add some weight to keep them down. |
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Posts: 134
| Any thoughts on weather conditions leading you guys out into the open water? Any stand out days that scream "theirs should be an open water bite!!!"? I finally got one last year on a outside planer board at night 10ft down over....nothing. it was pretty cool and after that i said i was going to give it some more time this year.
-Matt- |
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Posts: 538
Location: northern indiana | Chances are that if it was an outside planner board, the bait being trolled wasn't over nothing. There was most likely bait there that your graph didn't pick up. |
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Posts: 2097
| I like big profile baits in open water. I like to troll 10's through bait. |
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Posts: 134
| Wally thanks for the reply, what i meant was not any structure. That area i have seen good amounts of baitfish and it is in between 2 good spots. A pointe on one side and a inside turn on the other with a nice flat. I have been told from some guys connect the dots from good spot to good spot and the open water in between can be the highway. |
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Posts: 688
Location: Northern IL | Hi Matt,
Your question is a good one and one that many have asked. Imo you are on the right track when you talk about a highway, or what some would call a "migration path or route". There's something there we're not seeing.... Even with todays high priced gadgets.
1st let me say, terms like open water have a meaning. I'm not exactly sure what most think of when the phrase is used but if I'd have to guess it would mean, void of visible structure or I hesitate to say but bait..... Bait is not structure, there are many fishing days the bait does not show up on the screen.
We've spent a significant amount of time in areas that would qualifi to most as "open water". However after years of catching thousands of game fish, muskies, pike, walleye, lake trout, sm bass and a verity of other species on and around structure in what I think most would call "open water" and again imo not one single fish was ever caught in the middle of nowhere but instead on, above or out from a break on structure or a breakline.
Conclusion, #1, There is NO such thing as "OPEN WATER"! #2, Fish do NOT swim in a haphazard manor, but instead follow well defined routes, structure, breaks and bleaklines to get them from deep water to the shallows and back again. These routes may be used on a daily basis or a seasonal basis. Now whether we as fisherman can get to the point in our fishing, (mapping) where we can idenifi and interpret A migration route or highway before catching a fish ,,,,,, is another story, this is where we strive to be.
By learning to interpret structure in the shallows 1st, this will make you better at identifying structure in the "so called "open water...
Best of luck! |
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