Big Water

Well done!

S Adware fewe

If a fish hits your slider, it will usually just bounce the end of the rigger rod a lot and not release the line from the rigger release unless your release is set light or it's a big fish. When you see your down rigger rod starting to just bounce up and down. give your rod a pretty good "rip" to try and get the hook set on the slider lure and out of the release and reel like a maniac until the slider slides down to your last lure. On average you'll miss more fish on a slider than on your other setups.

Thanks for the report. I'll be at Wilson Thu/Fri/Sat to give it a go.

We headed up to Wilson late morning Friday with a middle aged couple from State College PA who work with my wife at Penn State University. This would be their first venture out on the Great Lakes and had only minimal fishing experience. Too say I was wary might be understating it. A lot of people equate fishing with sitting on a sunny bank on a Sunday afternoon and waiting for their bobbers to go under. I was pleasantly wrong. They took to fishing like ducks to water and Karen's husband Tom picked up on the techniques quickly and was helping rig within the first few hours. Friday Evening; We headed straight north out of Wilson at about 4:30 PM and after passing quite a lot of bait with no marks in 50-90' of water, we set up in about 150' and headed north. I ran Green, Blue and Carmel Dolphin F/Fs off of two wires and one rigger. Wires were out 175' to 350' and riggers from 60 to 125'. We also ran two inline boards with three colors on them with a couple of Jim Piano's (Hammerhead) Red Eye spoons in various bright colors from them. Lastly, we put a 300 copper down the chute with a mag Green NBK. After trolling to about 200, we hit a 4 lb coho on the three color. We quickly followed up with a 8 lb laker on the other three color. Seeing the top lines were active, I switched out the 300' copper with a 10 color (6 color out) pulling an orange baby spin doc and an orange J-11 down the chute. By evening we had put a handful of coho, steelies and lakers in the boat, but the other lines were pretty much dead other than a few knock offs on the riggers. Saturday Morning; We headed to about 200' a little west of Wilson and ran the same program as the day before. The coho, lakers and steelies came to play again, but we kept getting knocked off on the riggers and short strikes on the wires. I checked the tension on the Blacks Releases and they were plenty firm. The hooks were sharp on the flies and the drag right on the rods (I'll attribute some of this to the new folks being slow to get to the rods ) About 11:00 we went in as the lake was beginning to get a little nasty. Thinking that our friends might have had enough of getting bumped around, I told them we didn't have to go back out for an evening trip. They quickly said they definitely want to go back out!!! Saturday Evening; Same area as the morning and same setup, but things had changed. The lake had calmed down and we were picking at some 8-14 lb kings all evening in the 200' to 350' range. A lot of doubles during the evening kept things hopping. A Caramel Dolphin F/F fished on a rigger from 80-120' took most of the kings. Cohos and steelies still there. Sunday Morning; We took a quick look at the weather report and knew that rain was headed our way SOON. I now had a couple of true converts on my hands and they wanted to get rolling ASAP. Good thing we did! Fished both east and west of Wilson in 250 to 350' till about 11:00 and got into a better class of kings with the biggest being 23 1/2 lbs. Karen fought the big king for 20 minutes and refused any assistance in getting "her fish" to the boat. Nice job young lady!

Chinooker, PM sent for everything except the Carry Lite Shells and Swim Ladder.