April-May trolling

[reillym]

Hello fellow fishermen, trying to get a jump on getting gear ready for spring fishing,I still have a few spinning rods stringed up with 15lb braid that I thought I would use,wondering what is the prefered line

of most, im not going to be running planer boards so im trying to figure out how far back to troll for these

browns,I might need to get a couple of new reels with more capacity,I doubt they run like salmon but I want to use lighter gear than the heavy stuff for deeper water.Thanks

 

 

[Don Supon]

Simple. Add a flourocarbon LEADER (not line) with a small barrel swivel to the braid. 10 feet or so to the lure. Fish 100 ft. or more behind the boat. Inline planers are deadly for this tactic. With them you could shorten the leads to as little as 50 ft. and run them in the muddy water near shore.

[Chas0218]

How long are the spinning rods and what action?  For Trout you want a 8' rod with some backbone to it.  Somewhere around a medium action in the 8' and maybe med heavy in shorter rods.

 

Running off boards is going to be tough unless you add some weight to the line to get it down (1 or 2 larger split shots). I would run 100'+ leads from the release to the lure. 

 

I have caught smaller browns casting from shore on 7' medium action rod and 15lb braid.  It was fun but make sure you have a good 100 yards of line it is hard to turn the brown so it ran pretty much anywhere it wanted till it got tired.

 

Like mentioned above run a good flouro leader (nothing that you can purchase from the walmart shelf).

[Jolly II]

You'll be fine with your spinning rods in the spring for browns, 15lb braid is more than enough.  As Don stated above you want to add a leader, flourocarbon is good because it really dissappears in the water, and sometimes browns can be line shy in clear water, when they have been pressured too much.

When I was little kid, late 70s, before we started fishing with side planers, Dad and I would flat line plugs with spinning rods.  Worked great!  Then once side planers got popular, and we started fishing with them, we still used the spinning rods, but we had to pay attention to lead length, as you want all your leads on one side planer about the same distance. 

Give it a shot, and you may end up hooking into a king, and that could be a lot fun on a spinning rod.