Trolling: Techniques, Speed, and Gear Setup

Why Trolling Puts Fish in the Boat

Trolling is the great equalizer. While casting requires you to find the fish first and present a bait accurately, trolling lets you cover enormous amounts of water and bring the bait to the fish. On big water — Great Lakes, large reservoirs, coastal waters — trolling is often the most efficient and productive way to target pelagic and semi-pelagic species that roam vast stretches of open water.

There's a misconception that trolling is just dragging lures behind a boat and hoping for the best. Serious trolling involves precise speed control, specific depth targeting, lure selection, spread management, and constant adjustment. The anglers running planer boards on Lake Erie for walleye or stacking downriggers on Lake Michigan for king salmon are executing a system that took years to refine.

Trolling Speed: Matching the Target

Speed is everything in trolling. Too fast, and your lure action blows out or you pull the bait past fish. Too slow, and you lose the lure's designed action or fail to trigger reactive strikes. Every species has a preferred trolling speed range, and dialing it in precisely is what separates a limit from a goose egg.

• •Walleye: 1.0 to 2.2 mph. Walleye are notorious for being speed-sensitive. Some days they want 1.2 and not a tenth faster. Worm harnesses and slow-death rigs fish best at 1.0 to 1.5 mph. Crankbaits can go 1.5 to 2.2 mph.
• •Salmon (king/chinook): 2.0 to 3.5 mph. Kings tend to like a faster presentation. Spoons and flasher/fly combos work well at the higher end.
• •Lake trout: 1.5 to 2.5 mph. Lakers often respond to slower speeds than salmon. Spoons trolled deep on downriggers or lead core at a steady pace produce well.
• •Striped bass: 2.5 to 4.5 mph. Stripers like a faster troll. Umbrella rigs and parachute jigs at speed trigger aggressive strikes.
• •Musky: 3.0 to 6.0 mph. Trolling big crankbaits and bulldawgs at speed covers water and triggers the predatory response in these fish. Don't be afraid to run fast.

Invest in a reliable GPS unit with speed readout. Boat speedometers are notoriously inaccurate — GPS gives you true speed over ground, which is what the fish care about. Even a cheap handheld GPS or a smartphone app gets you close enough.

Planer Boards: Spreading the Spread

Planer boards are devices that carry your line out to the side of the boat, away from the motor noise and prop wash. They let you run multiple lines without tangling and cover a wider swath of water. On Lake Erie, it's common to see walleye boats running six to eight rods using inline planer boards fanned out behind the boat.

Inline boards clip onto your line and ride out to the side. When a fish hits, the board tips or dips, signaling the strike. Church Tackle TX-44 and Off Shore Tackle OR-12 Side Planer are industry standards. Inline boards are perfect for running crankbaits and worm harnesses for walleye, and they're simple to learn.

Mast systems use a large board attached to a cable from a mast or pole. Individual lines clip to the cable via release clips. When a fish strikes, the line pops free and you fight the fish without the board. These systems are more common on the Great Lakes for salmon and are more complex to set up but incredibly efficient for running many lines.

Running boards effectively takes practice. Stagger your line lengths so each board runs at a different distance from the boat. Start with your longest line on the outside board and work shorter as you go inside. This prevents tangles when you make turns.

Downriggers: Precision Depth Control

When fish are holding at a specific depth — say, 55 feet over 120 feet of water — downriggers are the tool that gets your bait there precisely. A downrigger is essentially a heavy ball (8 to 12 lbs) on a cable, lowered to a set depth on a spool with a counter. Your fishing line clips to a release on or near the ball. When a fish strikes, the release pops open and you fight the fish on your rod without the heavy weight.

Downriggers are essential equipment for Great Lakes salmon and trout trolling. Captains regularly run two to four downriggers at staggered depths, searching for the thermocline or the depth where bait and fish are stacked on the sonar.

Key downrigger tips:

• •Set your lure 10 to 20 feet behind the ball to keep it away from the hardware.
• •Use a light release tension setting — fish should be able to pop the release easily. Too tight, and you miss bites.
• •Stagger depths. Run one rigger at 45 feet and another at 60 feet until you find the zone.
• •Snap weights and slider rigs on downrigger setups let you add extra lines between your rigger ball and the surface.

Lead Core Line and Dipsy Divers

Lead core line is a nylon-braided line with a thin lead wire core. It sinks at a predictable rate — roughly 5 feet of depth per color (each color is 10 yards). So three colors of lead core gets your bait down about 15 feet. This is a fantastic system for walleye trolling with crankbaits when you need to reach 15 to 35 feet without heavy hardware.

Lead core requires large-capacity reels (line counter reels in the 30 to 40 size) and longer rods (8 to 10 feet) to handle the big-diameter line. The standard setup is a backing of braided line, then the lead core segments, then a fluorocarbon leader to the lure.

Dipsy Divers are a weighted, directional diving device that pulls your lure down and out to the side. They're adjustable for depth and direction, and they're popular for salmon and steelhead trolling on the Great Lakes. A Dipsy on a setting of 3 with a 100-foot setback might run your spoon at 45 feet and 35 feet off to the side. They're harder to learn than downriggers but add incredible versatility to your spread.

Crankbaits vs. Spoons: Choosing Your Trolling Lure

Crankbaits are the workhorse of walleye and bass trolling. Reef Runner 800 series, Rapala Tail Dancers, Berkley Flicker Minnows, and Bandit Walleye Deep divers are staples. Each crankbait has a specific dive curve — the more line you let out, the deeper it runs, up to its maximum depth. Precision Trolling Data (the phone app) gives you exact depths for specific lures at specific line lengths. Every serious troller uses it.

Spoons dominate salmon and lake trout trolling. They flutter and flash, imitating wounded baitfish. NK28 and Sutton spoons are Great Lakes classics. Moonshine Lures and Dreamweaver are newer companies putting out spoons with UV and glow finishes that produce in deep, dark water. Spoons run best on downriggers or dipsy divers because they don't dive on their own.

Flasher and fly combinations — an attractor (flasher or dodger) followed by a small fly or squid — are another staple for salmon. The flasher creates flash and vibration that draws fish in, and the trailing fly seals the deal. Run these on downriggers at precise depths.

GPS Trolling and Covering Water Smart

Modern trolling is a GPS game. Plotting your trolling passes on a chartplotter or GPS app lets you cover structure systematically instead of randomly dragging lures around the lake. Mark waypoints when you get bites, then make repeated passes through productive zones.

S-turns are a critical trolling tactic. When you turn the boat, the outside lures speed up and the inside lures slow down and drop deeper. This speed and depth change often triggers strikes from followers. Many experienced trollers make deliberate S-turns every few minutes just to create these changes.

Track your trolling data — speed, depth, lure, direction, and results. Logging trolling catches in CatchVault with GPS coordinates and the specifics of your spread turns a good day of fishing into repeatable intel. Over time, patterns emerge: a particular speed on a particular contour line at a particular time of year. That's how one good trip becomes a dozen.

Putting It All Together

A basic walleye trolling spread might look like this: two inline planer boards per side running Reef Runner 800 crankbaits on lead core at different lengths, plus two flatlines (rods straight behind the boat) running worm harnesses on bottom bouncers at 1.3 mph along a 28-foot contour line. That's six lines covering a 60-foot wide swath at a precise depth.

A Great Lakes salmon spread might run four downriggers staggered from 35 to 80 feet with spoons and flasher/fly combos, two dipsy divers out to the sides, and two rigger cheaters (slider lines) in between. Ten lines in the water, all at different depths and distances from the boat.

It sounds complicated written out, but it becomes systematic once you run it a few times. Start simple — two rods, one technique — and add complexity as you get comfortable. The fish will teach you the rest.