It was another great year with my brother in-law and my son. We caught fish early on Friday and then it was tough. We got some giant Jack semlt for Saturday and got our biggest salmon 19 inches. But it was tough. My highlight was catching a nice laker on a Gulp 4" minnow on a dart jig. This stuff works good - just get soem ziploc twist turn containers as the gulp jars will leak bad.
I decided to run an experiment - one down rigger plain and the other with both vertical and horizontals.
The setup was a chrome shark cannonball with a School O' Smelt troll attached with a Stack O'Smelt and off of this an Echo' Troll. I put the Echo Troll on the bottom rung of the vertical. This set up was very impressive to the eye. It truly took that mass of the weight and spread it up and out like the trailing edge of a bait pod.
The other down rigger had a black painted shark with no flash.
In terms of lures we used the same DB smelt (pink /silver with copper back) and tried both 8 ft back and 20 ft back.
For a 4 hour period - We caught 8 fish on the down rigger with attractors (all 8 ft back) and 1 fish on the other rigger 20 ft back.
6 of the fish were lakers...
On the vertical troll (Stack O' Smelt), the BIG BEADS were awesome in grabbing the wire to pull the assembly in the boat. It was nice to feed (bead by bead) the rig back in without bouncing the slack.
Overall, I am a believer in attractors but will often keep one rigger stealthily - (its the fly fisherman in me...)
It seemed that the boat traffic was less than in past years.
Chappy, I fished for lake trout for one hour during the derby and use the horizontal chartreuse/glow attractors you made and it produced 9 hits and 5 lake trout, the largest being 23", they produce. Monday after the derby, I still had fishing on the brain and headed to a trout pond in MA. For an hour and a half. set up the attractors, after a minute, a 23" broodstock at 15 feet down was on my line. Thanks again, -Tom
