Happy Troller or EZ Troller Plate on Motor

[Moveon]

Does anyone else use the EZ Troller or the Happy Troller plate on their motor to slow the boat down for trolling for walleyes or crappie?

[Fisherjoe]

I have the Happy Troller on a 17' deep-V with 90 hp 2-stroke. It does a great job. I can get below 0.5 mph on my gps. I use it to troll for stripers and hybrids.

[Moveon]

I have the Happy Troller on a 17' deep-V with 90 hp 2-stroke. It does a great job. I can get below 0.5 mph on my gps. I use it to troll for stripers and hybrids.

I'm a little worried about drilling holes in my motor but I'm going to mount the EZ Troller that I just got from Cabela's today. It's got 5/8" OD sized bolts and uses four of them with washers and lock nuts to secure it to the plate on my motor. I guess the motor is made out of aluminum metal and should be easy to drill into with my portable battery operated DeWalt Drill.

Does your Happy Troller use a metal rod to work the up/down option or a rope. The EZ Troller comes with a rope. I'm going to have to figure out how to secure the rope for easy access.

It's well buit and looks pretty sturdy. The EZ Troller's plate comes in two parts and the lower part is attached to the upper part with two spring hinges. This is there in case you take off too fast before moving the plate into the up position. The lower part will give and absorb some of the props wash so it won't bend the entire plate. I don't know how well it works but I thought it might be a good feature to have.

Cabela's has this one on sale for less than $90. And Since Cabela's doesn't have a store in Indiana they don't charge IN sales tax. Which saves money.

Getting down to 0.5 mph is the key to good trolling for some types of fish.

I've been pulling a 5 gallon plastic bucket with holes drilled in the bottom behind my boat to help slow me down. I have a sking harness that is made out of metal cable and has a float built into the harness to keep it on top of the water. I drag the bucket about 4 to 5 ft behind my boat and can only get down to 1.2 mph unless I'm going into the wind. Even without the bucket going into a strong wind I can get speeds down to 1.5 mph or a little less.

Crappie are more likely to bit if you going below 1.0 mph in my experience. I do seem to catch more crappie while moving a vertical jigged bait very slow. If the baits not moving they won't hit it somethings. They will chase a crank bait at times but most of the time they like the baits going less then 1.5 mph.

I'll know a lot more about how this works after I get it mounted today and take it out and used it.

I'll try to report back.

Last time I went out using the bucket I caught about 6 fish on the crank baits. Most all the fish caught at first were on a small trailer jig that I tied to a jib and snap swivel and then attached to the back hook on the 200 bandit crank bait. The jig was tied on with 6 lb test mono and the line was about 2 ft long. I use 10 lb test Stren on my main line so that the 6 lb test line will break before the main line. That way I won't lose the $5 crank bait.

This setup can cause a few problems though. the trailer jig can get messed up in the hooks or tangled up at times and you won't know it until you reel the thing in and check it. And at time when I get too shallow I'll pick up some weeds on both the trailer jig and the crank bait. I've ended up dragging a crank bait all over the lake not knowing that it was full of weeds. But the fish are in the weeds and if you want to catch a fish I've found that you must get the bait's into the edge of the weedline.

Weeds in the lake I fish stop growing at about 8 ft to 9 ft deep. They are prolific at 6 ft and less. They are intermittent at 7 ft.

If you can stay right along the edge you will catch fish.

But sometimes the crappie like to suspend out over the deeper water within a short distance from the ledge or drop off. I'm trying to get them in this area that In-Fisherman Calls the "Confined Open Water Zone". But they are often in a neutral mood and or just resting and hard to catch when they suspend out over this open water. At least that's been my experience. Now there are times when I do catch them this way. But most of my crappie are caught using minnows and vertically fishing deep in brush piles on the bottom. There they can be anywhere from the very bottom of the brush to above the brush pile.

In the strip pits it's fairly barren except for a few scub brushes that grew before the lake was filled with water and after they mined the coal. These are the hot spots for crappie other than man made brush piles.

If I were more energetic I'd be making a lot more man made brush piles in these pits. But I don't have a permit to do so and I'm getting lazy and old.

I'll have to get up to Patoka to fish for some Striper and Hybrids. We have the little white stripers but they are new to this lake and still pretty small. They had to have swam up to this pit from the Ohio River via Pigeon Creek and Bluegrass Creek when it last flooded the area. We have had two big floods since 2003 when I first started fishing Bluegrass F&W area's pits. All three of the biggest pits get flooded from time to time. So any fish that swims in the Ohio could potentially be in these waters.

The IDNR also stocked some muskies in these waters. I may hook into one of them someday and have some fun.

[JustinM]

Why not use a drift sock or 5 gallon bucket.

[Moveon]

Why not use a drift sock or 5 gallon bucket.

I was thinking about using the drift sock but figured I'd get the fishing line fouled up in it when retrieving a bigger fish. Now the smaller crappie I can being straight in with the rod and reel. But I've had larger bass swim under and around the boat a lot of times one even wrapped the line around my propeller. I had to land that fish by hand after cutting the line that was wrapped around my prop. That was a nice 16" bass that I caught over at Otter Pit that weighted a little over 2.5lbs.

And then if you stop the motor and the boat starts drifting the line towing the drift sock can drift back into the motor and get tangled up in the prop or cut if the driver is not paying attention.

[Moveon]

It's hard for me to keep everything in order when only fishing one rod with a simple crank bait and trailer jig. The Jig and the leader are always getting caught up in the crank bait's hooks. I use a snap swivel on the end of the leader to attach a small jig onto the back hook of the bandit crank bait. I found that using a large snap swivel often let the snap swivel get caught in the hook's points. So I started using a much smaller swivel with no swivel to make it smaller. Now only the leader gets wrapped around the back treble hook sometimes. Both the crank bait and the small 1/16 oz lead head jig's hook get caught up in the weeds a lot. One has to watch the depth on the Humminbird Map Screen to make sure that your bait doesn't run too deep in the weeds. Weeds stop ground at Bluegrass at about 7 to 8 ft deep.

If I'm using the side planer with the tattle flag I've got one more thing to have to watch out for. The side planer board is snapped onto the line after the correct amount of fishing line is let out behind the boat. I use a line counter reel measure the amount of line I have out. I use the Precision Trolling Bible book to tell me the dive curves for the various types of crank baits. I can let out 25 ft of 10 lb test Stren mono with a bandit 200 and get down to about 7 or 8 ft deep. That's where the fish are at the edge of the weeds. But I still manage to get the hooks on the crank bait fouled up with weeds all the time at Bluegrass Pit.

And tower the five gallon bucket works pretty good. I still have the problem of getting stuck going forward with the nose in the shore line weeds and having to back up. To do that without running over the bucket's tow line I have to get up and climb over the back of my boat to pull the bucket's tow rope and harness out of the way of the engine. I have a home made PVC umbrella holder on my back bass seat on the back deck and it gets in my way of reaching the back deck from the bench seat. I sit on the bench seat while driving the boat. I'm not a spring chicken anymore and fish by myself a lot. I've fallen out of the boat a few times in the past and have to be careful not to fall out again. I'm on a lot of heart medicine so my balance is not what it used to be. So that's why I'm not as stable on my feet as I used to be. I can still get around ok but I just have to be more careful.

With the Happy Troller Device there is a long rope that's very easy to pull while driving the boat. It releases the spring loaded locking mechanism on the Happy Troller and allows it to drop down into the slow trolling position easily with out me having to get up and move anything. So it's a lot easier for me to use. And to put the happy Troller plate back up in the UP position for fast speeds I simply pull the rope and increase speed. The pressure of the water will move the trolling plate back up into the UP position. It's locked in place there until I pull the rope again and release the locking mechanism.

BTW: I got the Easy Troller instead of the Happy Troller. If you Google them both on line you can see the difference. Plus Cabela's had the Easy Troller on sale for some reason and I saved about 20 bucks on it. It's normally over $100 plus tax and shipping.

The Easy Troller is well made and very sturdy. Installing took about 20 minutes and most of that time was spent gathering all the tools I needed for the job. A battery and the portable DeWalt Drill and the socket wrench and sockets. It took me a while to find my 5/16" drill bit. After getting all the tools it took me about 5 to 10 minutes to clamp the Easy Troller in place on the engine's lower unit cavitation plate and to make sure that the plate was 3" back from the prop. Then I simply drilled the four holes to mount it. The back two holes I added in a new location as the predrilled holes in the EZ Troller were too far outboard. So I drilled two new holes in the EZ Troller mounting plate and moved them inboard a 1/3" or so. My motor is old and it's a 35 HP so the cavitation plate is more narrow than a larger motor's would be. I'm guessing about this as I don't have a larger motor to compare mine to. I could have banged the easy Troller's U shaped mounting plate closer together but I didn't do that. It mounted just fine with the two new holes. And the installation instructions say that's OK to do. The aluminum metal on the EZ Troller mounting bracket is thick and strong. The plate that blocks the water flow behind the prop is hinged at the bottom 1/4. This is a safety feature that the EZ Troller has that the Happy Troller lacks. This allow the lower part of the plate to deflect out in case you take off with the plate in the down locked position and don't pull the unlock rope. This keeps the plate from bending under high load. The lower part will exceed the tension on the spring holding it in place and bend backwards to release the water pressure on the rest of the upper part of the plate.

So far I've used the Easy Troller for about 1 hour. It worked well and let me slow down to 0.5 mph easily. It felt like I was barely moving at that speed. So I just pushed the throttle forward to get up to 1.0 mph.

Some guy's cut a new notch in the plate to give a third intermediate position. Once I figure out how to cut that notch professionally and make it nice and neat I'll do that too. I'm not really sure how to make a nice clean cut in that thick metal plate material. Hack saw? Drill some of the metal out first then use a jig saw or hack saw to finish the cut. The cut is a U shaped notice that's about 1/2" long or deep into the metal from the edge. And the notch is about 2/3" long. I'm just guessing on these measurements. I'm have to get the tape measure out and get a more accurate measurement of the factory cut notices. But they are very smooth cuts as if cut out with a laser beam or plasma cutter. Very precise and accurate cutting was done on this material.

Oh yea. I almost forgot the fishing report.

Results were good this time out. I was actually fishing without the Easy Troller Plate engaged. Ie it was in the up position for many hours as the wind was blowing and I didn't need it to go slow. I just trolled some crank baits into the wind and got slowed down to 1.4 mph.

I caught three nice big crappie. Big for these strip pits that is. All three were around 11" to 12" long and very healthy looking. Not the skinny fish that I normally see at Bluegrass.

I caught the first one along a stretch of shoreline and before I could turn around and make another trolling pass some guys in another boat came straight at me and ruined my trolling pass going North. They wanted to cut between me and the shoreline but I headed my boat toward the shoreline and they got the message and turned out to the main lake and away from me and the shoreline. Some guys just don't know the rules of the water.

Then they stopped about 25 to 40 yards South of me where I was fishing and right in the path of my first trolling pass where I caught my first good crappie. I hollered at them of said something like "HEY!" but then I stopped and didn't say what I really felt. After all I don't own the lake. But I did swing around and make a second trolling past right by them. As I passed I told them that I had been fishing (trolling) this area before they got there and was catching fish. I caught my second crappie right within close proximity of them. By now they were putting the anchor out. I reeled in my second big crappie. By now my territorial instincts were coming out but I didn't say anything. I think I did tell them that this was were I was catching fish. But they could see that by now. By now they decided to move on and finally pulled up anchor and moved down into the Mouth of the "H". I could still see them but they were out of my way now. I caught one more crappie out of that spot and then they stopped biting.

I think that my trailer jig's line got fouled up in the back treble hook again and I was getting frustrated with this setup. So I shorted up the trailer line and put a different snap swivel on the leader.

I could not decide whether to hook the snap swivel to the screw hole on the back of the crank bait or on the split ring that holds the treble hook to that screw hole. o--(XXX). So what does one call that screw that screws into the crank bait and has a ring on the end of the screw? Anyway that's what I'm talking about here.

I finally got the crank bait to wobble properly when the trailer jig attached. I think that next time I'll use a lighter trailer jig. 1/16 Oz lead head jigs are great for a slip bobber and tight lining but I think a 1/64 oz jig would work better as a trailer on a crank bait. The trailer jig does mess with the balance of the bandit crank bait and keeps it from running straight. Which is maybe why I was not catching fish like I should have. I saw huge schools of fish on the Humminbird Depth finder screen but when I set my crank bait to fish that depth the fish didn't bite. Perhaps I didn't have the crank bait running true with the trailer jig attached.

Note: I caught every one of my fish on the Trailer Jig and not the Crank bait itself. I got the idea of using a trailer jig from the Herter's Professional Guide Book that my Dad bought many years ago. I think we got it back in the 1960's when I was still a sophomore in HS. I remember reading that book many years ago. It's got a lot of useful information on fishing and hunting. And based on the trailer jig idea it's good information.

Just know that using a trailer jig will cause more foul ups too.

BTW: Thursday afternoon when I launched the boat there were only about 4 other boat trailers in the parking lot. I figured that by fishing in the middle of the week I'd have a lot more room to fish. But then I see this boat come around the corner and heading right at me on my first trolling pass of the day. Some times things just don't work out right.