What did I hook into at 26 ft deep in 65 ft of water? The one that got away was huge!

[SteveM4A1]

Well Sunday I went out fishing again and trolled my Bandit 700's with 125 ft of 10 lb test stren line out behind the boat. My Precision Trolling Bible tells me that a Bandit 400 with 125 ft of 10 lb test line out will run about 18 ft deep. So I figure the Bandit 700's will run the same depth of a little bit deeper. Bandit 700's have a bb inside them that slides to the front of the bait to make it dive faster. But I don't have a dive depth chart for the Bandit 700's.

Anyway I trolled though the same area as the last time and didn't hook into anything. But last time I let out 180 ft of line. According to my depth chart that should not make it go that much deeper. Water depth was still around 160 ft deep. I didn't hook into anything this time.

I did manage to catch two short bass using two different Bandit crank baits of different colors. One was chartreuse with and orange belly and the other was pearl colored with a black stripe on it's top. Both were Bandit 700's with the same amount of line out behind the boat. I used two different types of line counters to determine how much line was let out behind the boat.

Later on Sunday we fished for crappie with minnows and some small ultra light open faced spinning reels and caught two nice big bluegills on the minnow rigs.

I took my neighbor's kid with me on this trip for the first time. He's been asking me to take him fishing for a few years now and I decided it was time to take him out in the boat finally. He had a good time. I had to rearrange the boat some to accommodate and extra person but that was not too hard to do. He's a good fisherman too. He landed on of the Largemouth bass all by himself. His dad had to do some work around the house or he would have gone out with us.

Reading your trolling stories makes me wanna start trolling. Sounds interesting.

[Moveon]

I started trolling way back in 1969 when we took our first family trip to Ontario Canada. Up there they back troll so that they can go slower and catch deep water walleye around large rock formations. My boat's not setup for that type of backwards trolling. The boat we used up on Canada had a motor on the back with a tiller handle and no steering wheel. I'd have to turn around and look back and I'm too old to do that anymore with my boat.

But I think that the key is to go slower some times.

I am learning that the bass seem to suspend really deep in the summer months.

I got hooked on trolling for bass when I used one of Buck Perry's Spoon Plugs down on KY lake and hooked into about a four to six pound LM bass at the mouth of one of the creeks that runs into the Tennessee River. I think it was Piney Creek or one next to it.

I've read for years how the bass use the creek channels to move from deep to shallow water and back again. So I thought that the intersection of a big creek and a river would be a good spot in KY lake. I was right and so was Buck Perry. That man knew how to catch some big bass.

One thing about trolling is that you can cover a lot of ground fast. And once you figure out where the fish are you can slow down and cast to them. Using a count down method with a slow sinking bait that when retrieved slowly will say at a constant depth is they key.

The areas I tend to hook into a lot of bass are along points and other steep drop offs. I see guys fishing in these spots all the time. Bass fishermen like to station their boats off the points and fan cast across the points the the mouth of the entry to the "H" of Bluegrass Pit. The "H" is a part of the pit that's has four bays or lagoons that form the shape of the letter H when viewed from above. It's a popular spot to fish and there are ususally a lot of boats on this part of the pit during the weekends.

I'm still going to buy some side planer boards so that I can get the baits out to the side of the boat and get them out of the turbulence caused by the propeller. I read that these side planer boards really do work. Many Walleye Fishermen troll with them. They also have tattle tail flags on the boards that pop up when you get a fish or some sea weed on the bait. This helps detect bites faster and prevents you from dragging a fish behind the boat and not knowing that you have a fish on the line. The LM Bass that I caught may have been on my line for a while before I looked at the pole and discovered it was acting differently. I was busy talking to my neighbor and was not watching the pool as I should have been.

I've caught a lot of small bass by trolling and often I catch one within a few minutes of starting my trolling. I was surprised as how many fish I've caught this summer. But I'm really looking to find the crappie and have not caught on single crappie while trolling this summer. In fact I'm having trouble catching my crappie this summer. I'm wondering if the Muskie have moved them to new areas? I'm hearing that the Muskie are getting bigger. In fact IDNR survey people are asking the fishermen at Bluegrass if they would like to see IDNR increase the Muskie Size limit from 36" to 40" or something like that. Maybe it was 45 or 46" long. I can't recall the exact length that they want to raise the muskie limit to. But that would be a big muskie for sure.

In fact I may have to break out the big muskie baits and some bigger rods and some lead core line to get down deeper to catch some of them big muskies. But then again I read or heard that they like to frequent the shallow water's in the back of the bays during the summer months. They hunt the smaller fish and I guess that's where you find the small fish in the summer months. Back in the shallow water's where the weed beds grow best.

I would have trolled longer Sunday but the kid wanted to cast and fish differently. So I stopped trolling and got the ultra light rods out and we threw some small spinner and a few jigs but without luck.

Fishing should have been good Sunday but we didn't do that well. It was high overcast clouds and the sun was blocked making it darker than normal. And the winds were light and the water temperature was 73 deg at the surface. Fishing for crappie will pick up when the water surface temps get down into the 50's. That's when the crappie head back into the shallows again for the fall feed. Then they head back out to the deeper basins for the winter.

Reading your trolling stories makes me wanna start trolling. Sounds interesting.