Eight Simple Rules For Trolling In My Boat

The following appears in the August issue of California Sportsman:

Between guiding and producing videos, I spend an average of 150 days a year out on the water trolling for trout. While I don’t consider myself a trout trolling expert, when you spend that amount of time doing anything, you can’t help but develop some hard and fast rules.

My guide service is unique because catching trout is only part of the day’s focus. I offer instructional guide trips and the goal is to help my clients catch more and bigger trout while fishing aboard their own boats or kayaks in the future.

In this article I’m going to share the same dos and don’ts with the readers of California Sportsman that I drive home to my clients out on the water.

RULE 1: DO YOUR HOMEWORK

Before you head out to fish a new lake, spend some time determining what the trout feed on and how large the fish grow. Valley and foothill reservoirs featuring forage such as pond smelt and threadfin shad call for different lure choices than higher-elevation lakes, where the trout spend most of their time feeding on insects.

In general, when fishing a lake where the dominant forage item is pond smelt or shad, baitfish-imitating lures, flies and soft plastics are a logical starting point. If you are visiting a “bug lake,” one where insects are the dominant forage, bright-colored lures tend to work well.

In the latter situation, you’re not going to imitate an insect with trolling gear, so by using brightly colored lures you are hoping to tempt the trout into striking out of curiosity. Typically, high-elevation trout are more aggressive feeders than their lowland cousins, which causes them to be more willing to bite.

At valley and foothill reservoirs with large trout and a forage base of shad or pond smelt, size-appropriate baitfish-pattern lures are your best weapon for hooking a large trout.

Up in the high country, lakes featuring large trout often have kokanee salmon populations and big numbers of small rainbows. In these lakes, 8- to 10-inch salmon and immature rainbows are a favorite meal of trout in excess of 4 pounds.

In lakes where big trout gobble smaller fish, large plugs and flies that imitate small- to medium-sized kokanee and rainbows are often the best offering for hooking a trophy.

Along with determining what the trout feed on and which lures work the best, it’s wise to do a little more research before your next fishing trip.

Are the fish biting well? How deep are other anglers scoring? Are the trout holding in the main body or up the river arms? What is the lake level and surface temperature?

Knowledge is power when it comes to trout fishing success!

RULE 2: FISH WITH A PLAN

Back in the 1980s, when the San Francisco 49ers started winning Super Bowls, their coach, Bill Walsh, scripted the first 20 offensive plays of the game. Only after the team had run those 20 plays would he begin making adjustments. I strongly encourage you to take a similar approach on your trout trolling adventures.

Whenever I go fishing, I have three plans. Plan A is my best guess as to what is going to work; B and C are fallback plans I break out in the event Plan A fails to produce. When you do start catching fish with one of your preplanned approaches – but don’t feel you’re doing quite as well as you should be – that’s the time to start making incremental changes in terms of lure color, trolling speed and depth to see if you can turn a fair bite into a great bite.

RULE 3: DON’T TRY TO DO TOO MUCH

This rule goes hand in hand with fishing with a plan. Please don’t be the angler who constantly changes lures and goes zipping up and down the lake looking for that special spot.

Trout trolling success at the highest level is all about building patterns. Where are the fish situated? What will they hit? What is the best trolling speed? Remember, magic lures and secret locations don’t exist. Patience is your greatest asset when it comes to building a pattern and catching trout.

Trout don’t constantly feed all day every day. Arrive at the lake with a solid plan built around lures you have confidence in and then fish them hard, giving those presentations every chance to succeed.

Here’s how I build a pattern: Let’s say I have a boatload of clients and I’m running four rods with four different lures. Catching one fish on a lure doesn’t tell me much. If I catch two fish on a given lure in a short amount of time, I put a second identical lure into the spread. If a third fish comes on the same lure in a reasonable amount of time, I put out a third lure of the same type and color. I seldom put on a fourth identical lure, no matter how good the bite is, because the other lure on the fourth rod is my benchmark presentation. It helps me determine if the bite is changing. It’s also the rod I experiment with. If the trout are hitting chrome spoons well, will they hit copper even better? The fourth rod allows me to answer that question.

Always be mindful of this: When the trout begin biting, make the most of it and hook as many fish as fast as you can before they go off the bite.

RULE 4: CUT THE LAKE DOWN TO SIZE AND NEVER LEAVE BITING TROUT TO FIND TROUT
I was trolling from my pedal kayak at Lake Davis a few years back. I’d found a small low spot in a shallow bay. The low area was about 200 yards long and maybe 50 yards wide; it was holding some really nice 2- to 4-pound rainbows. They were gobbling orange trolling flies and I was having a great time hooking fish after fish.

At one point, a small boat trolled through the area. The angler hooked and landed a rainbow in the 3-pound class and kept right on trolling down the lake. Did the angler catch more trout that day? Probably, but he stumbled on an epic bite, landed one fish and left. Don’t be that guy!

Your goal should always be to eliminate unproductive water, and then when you find willing trout, cut the lake down to size and work the fish hard. Never leave a productive area or group of biters until the action dries up and they give you a reason to leave.

One of the ways you can stack up a big number of hookups in a short amount of time is to keep your offerings in the strike zone. Never forget that one of the best ways to land a trophy trout is to land a lot of trout.

RULE 5: TROLL AS SHALLOW AS POSSIBLE

Trollers have a tendency to fish too deep. The surface temperature is the deciding factor in how deep I fish.

If I’m targeting rainbows and the surface temperature is 65 degrees or less, I know there will be trout near the surface early, late and anytime there is a breeze ruffling the surface.

I seldom drop down below the 15-foot mark during the late fall, winter and early spring. When the surface temperature is 65 or below, the most active fish will be near the surface, so that’s where I want my offerings positioned. A large percentage of the fish beyond 8 pounds my clients catch over the course of the season are hooked in the top 10 feet of the water column.

Rainbow trout originated in streams. They want to feed up. You always want your lure positioned over the top of the fish. They want to move up, intercept the prey item and then drop back down.

Even if the surface temperature is 85 degrees and you are marking trout 100 feet deep, you still want to position your offering 5 to 10 feet above the main biomass of trout and bait.

Their origins in streams also explains why trout feed more aggressively when the breeze creates surface chop. Trout love to orient in the current. What you and I see as wind-generated waves and whitecaps, the trout see as current.

If there are trout holding 10 to 15 feet deep and a stiff breeze comes up, you can count on those trout to pull up into the top 5 feet of water in order to position themselves in the wind-created current.

RULE 6: DON’T OVERLOOK THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LEADCORE
I came up with what I call the hybrid leadcore rig. It consists of a 50-foot mono topshot, three colors of leadcore and 20-pound braid backing. This rig allows me to fish up to 20 feet deep with light tackle. I’ve found that head to head, my leadcore rig will outfish a downrigger almost every time if the trout are in the top 20 feet of water.

Why is this the case? I’m not sure and, frankly, I don’t care. All I know is leadcore has a quality or qualities that allows it to outperform a downrigger. As a result, from late fall through early spring the downriggers on my boats and kayaks get very little use. Instead of running downriggers, I make use of leadcore rigs and toplines to generate strikes.

RULE 7: ALWAYS USE FLUOROCARBON LEADER MATERIAL
Fluorocarbon reflects light at about the same rate as water. For all practical purposes, this makes fluorocarbon invisible to trout. Some days you can catch plenty of trout without using fluorocarbon, but on other days you might not get a strike without it. There is no way to determine when you’ll need fluoro and when you won’t, so I use it all the time.

I also caution my clients not to go too light in terms of leader breaking strength. Most of the time – even when I’m fishing ultraclear water – I go with 8- to 10-pound test. While I catch trout of all different sizes, my focus is always on hooking and landing big fish. When you hook a 10-plus-pound trout, that is not the time to be praying your 4-pound leader material will hold!

RULE 8: HAVE A PLAN TO LAND BIG TROUT

When speaking at fishing seminars or just chatting with clients, I’ll often ask folks what their plan is for landing a really big trout – say, something over 8 pounds. The question is a real crowd-stopper and is often met with confused looks and nervous mannerisms. I’ve met very few anglers who have had a ready answer.

To land a certifiably huge trout, nine times out of 10 you’ve got to have a plan and execute it flawlessly. Big trout have a way of getting away at the last second, and very often when you get a big trout to the boat, you’ll only get one shot at netting it.

Giant trout don’t show up every time you hit the water or even every season; that may be the reason most casual troutheads don’t have a plan for landing one.

The first thing I do to set the stage for big trout success is make certain my gear is up to the challenge when a jumbo fish comes knocking. As I said, I never go below an 8-pound fluorocarbon leader. I check the drag setting on my reels multiple times per day to make certain they didn’t get overtightened by accident. I make certain every knot is tied perfectly. If I find a bad spot in my line, I replace it immediately. Would you race in the Indy 500 if your car wasn’t working perfectly? Of course not, and the same goes for the trout fishing gear you are going to battle a trophy with.

Let’s say you’ve hooked the trout of a lifetime, your gear was up to the task, you remained cool, kept the boat in gear, and moved forward. Now is the moment of truth. It’s time to net the fish. Netting a big fish by yourself is a challenge, so I’m going to assume you are fishing with a partner and you’ve had the forethought to purchase a net with a long handle and a large hoop. If you’re the angler on the rod, it’s your job to lead the tired fish to your partner with the net and to lay the fish out on the surface with its head up.

If you’re the netter, keep the net away from the fish until the final second so that you don’t tangle the gear with the net when the fish is still hot. You never want to stab at a fish with its head down. If you do, the trout will dive and you’ll hit the leader, likely dislodging the hook.

A lot of folks make the mistake of trying to net a big trout tail first. This seldom works out. When the trout senses it’s being trapped it’s going to surge forward; that’s why you always net big fish head first, so that they swim deeper into the net when they panic.

If your gear is up to the task, your drag is set light and you have a netting plan, you and your partner won’t be prone to panic and you’ll likely put that monster trout into the boat! CS

Editor’s note: Cal Kellogg is a longtime Northern California-based outdoors writer. Subscribe to his YouTube channel Fish Hunt Shoot Productions at youtube.com/user/KelloggOutdoors.