chowder

Team Helgoya, here are few basic ideas I have from reading your post: 1. The line you are using sounds too light, unless you are using a very small dipsy. 2. It is best to use a reel with a linecounter and rod that is made for dipsy divers 3. Use a rod holder that is made to handle the strain from the dipsy diver 4. Do not use light line from the diver to the bait 5. The combination of a wireline rod, wire line and the dipsy diver is well worth the time and money spent experimenting with it. I would not troll deep water without using them. 6. Use a snubber with a wireline dipsy setup- at least to start with! P.S. I have family & friends in Sweden & Norway.

Stinger, NICE BROWN- now that's what I'm talking about! Stan, the flasher in the picture looks like a full size Pro Troll, as the water warms up in Cayuga, the browns start gradually moving deeper, especially as the day progresses. In June we had browns hit from 15'-50' in 30-200+ FOW. Tim, I like the swivel idea, just have to make sure it goes thru guides & reel, do you have any recollection of the size?

Tim, are you going with the albright knot from the super braid to the big game on the SD rigs?

Stan,on Cayuga lake,one of the Finger Lakes(40 miles long, 400+ deep) my best success rate came from trolling shallow, stained water with stix behind Offshore inlines. On Lake Ontario ,out of Oswego ,we did much better with shallow riggers, running long leads. I am planning to use dual planer boards this spring because I think larger browns are ultra spooky in shallow/clear water and also even though we have a set of inlines with the tattle flags, the dinks get dragged and the mediums don't fight much until the board is off. We also will run 2 colors off the inlines in the spring to search multiple depths. Browns behave rather differently in Cayuga than their counterparts on Ontario, especially after the water warms up, then they are frequently out of temp, thats when a multi depth approach can really pay off.

Sounds good Tim! We were hoping to get the Simrad installed this fall, still waiting for a call saying the shop has an open bay, but now we have a foot of snow and the roads are covered in salt, sand and frozen slush, I think the AP-15 is going to spend the winter in the box instead of in the boat. I pulled all the displays, disconnected the batteries and mothballed it yesterday, I drained & winterized it a while back but we were hoping to get out again with it to check out the auto pilot once it was in- the die hards claim the fingers have good action from Thanksgiving to February. I have had a key employee out since Oct. (dislocated shoulder), so between the weather and that, it's looking like the late season fishing is not happening.

I have used Berts ratchet rod holder in the track setup for dipsy setups and I like them better than traxtech, watch out for the black rubber guide getting pulled off if a youngster grabs the rod out of the holder with a fish on, it can come off and wind up in the drink. It is important to check fittings - dipsy rigs put a lot of strain and vibration on everything! I have heard people say that after a few years, even the Bert's holder will start to show the wear and tear that a Dipsy rig hands out.

Tim, thanks got em ordered! I also used the small pro-troll flashers with peanuts & spoons without much results, we got very few browns off riggers on Cayuga in shallow spring water, but at Oswego we got them all that way. We have 3 riggers in the Islander, so we should be able to search a little better behind the boat, then a pair of sd rigs and stix off the dual boards and we should be in the brown business! Fat Nancy's won't have those NBK copper cup stingers till "Spring", hopefully I will remember to get some. I did get some copper cup side spoons from Warrior in the small scorpion size.

Tim, on those dodgers are you talking about Luhr Jenson 4"/000 ?

I was leaning the same way in the line department - especially watching the bend in the sd rigs, they seem to torque over as much if not more than a mag dipsy! Thanks for the spoon tips, I am trying to put together a decent spoon selection this winter because it's tough to grow and harvest all that deer food, fish ,and procure tackle at the same time.

Guys, you need to understand my situation. I hunt 600 acres of crop land that is surrounded by forest - get the picture? 2 deer/bow stamp, 3 deer regular season(7M) x 2 hunters (oldest son + myself) = 10 deer. We also wind up filling other peoples DMPs, which is completely legal. It is nothing here to see 7-12 deer in one place. We grow a lot of cow feed and deer like it and grow well on it so we make the best of it and eat a lot of venison. I have 1 large freezer for venison alone. We feed the deer and they feed us, it is not a typical situation but if you look at the whole picture it makes perfect sense.

Yesterday I brought 10 shoulders and 10 hind quarters over to the guy who makes the awesome sausages- it's important to maintain inventories! Back to the diver setups, got a question; the original dipsy setups I put together last spring I used 14# Fireline Crystal, after I started using wire I just left these in the garage until I started using them to mess around with the slide divers in the fall, question is should I use something else for line, that Crystal seems to stick out like a sore thumb to me and I do have a bunch of dark green Power Pro and Spider wire left over from making up lead core rigs? Also, who makes those copper back side spoons you had on Dapper Dan and where do you get them?

Does anybody use a superbraid slide diver (set on 2 or3) rig with a long lead behind the sd to target browns in the spring. We tried this setup for rainbows on the Fingers in the fall without much success but we only used it once, it took me most of an hour just to get the lite bite feature to keep from tripping.

Stan, have you used big boards at all? Hey, I like the pix, the fish are gorgeous!

If you want to target different depths simultaneously core can be a good tool, but if you do not currently use wire dipsy rigs you should probably set up one or two, this will give you an awesome laker spread. Search this forum for advice on wire dipsy setups and I can probably fill in any gaps, if you troll for Lakers you want to be running at least one of these setups!

Now I know I am tired of skinning deer! Looks like you guys were on the east side around Atwaters maybe. Thanks for the pix, and I was gonna throw in the mothballs and disconnect the battery leads but maybe not!

Typically the factory 800 number is the way to go, they generally give you a repair authorization number and you pay shipping to the service center and back, often this adds up to $30, then you wait about 2 months+ and you get either a new one or a rebuild. This way if the item is under $100, they figure a lot of people will just get another one so they can get back to business- you were very lucky that the retailer handled the claim! It seems to me like I either buy the top of the line unit( which I don't do yet) or multiples of middle range units, that way you have spares and can actually afford to wait for warranty claims, plus it makes me happy to see all those rod & reel combos hanging on the wall while I skin deer.

Welcome to the LOU, tremendous amount of info & helpful people here. I started trolling last spring and I would never have learned as much without this site. Although it can take a little time to get used to using "search" it can really speed you thru a lot of preliminary questions- Good Luck!

A dipsy gives a very different presentation of the same bait at the same depth as a rigger setup. Another factor is that a dipsy rig is often presenting a bait off to the side and further back than a rigger so there is a stealth issue in addition to the action and sonic signature differences.

Stan, with these lower gas prices I might hitch my 16' behind the jeep and give those awesome looking lakes a try, nice pix!

Getting tired of warm afternoons in the tree stand, anyone try Cayuga recently?

search posts, lots here on leadcore setups.

We need to find an effective way for as many anglers and industry people as possible to see this asap. Did you post this on GLA? It should be posted as a sticky on most of the forums!

We had more or less the same results with a similar approach. This our first year at this and I am wondering if a planer board bite will return here shortly or will the fish scatter further, making it tough to get much going?

Do most people remove gps/depth raider, etc monitors on a boat that is shed stored in a secure situation?

We went over on Sunday worked T-falls to the South end, riggers 20-50, 4&6 colors, wire slidediver 100-150', and reg wire dipsy 140-210. A pretty day w/ out many legal fish, though we did get a 32" Laker off a rigger rod that my 11 year had quite a time with, for a laker this fish really had some fight in it! From Bolton point to the Yacht club we ran a flatline/stix combo off a board and it would only stay out long enough to grab one 10-12" salmon after another. The weeds got terrible down there and we quit. I wish we had tried the surface presentation earlier, but maybe it would not have attracted anything of any size, we really did not see many good marks even in and around bait pods, which made me slightly suspicious that some fish are up high. Has anybody tried flatlines much?This is my first season with this so I don't have a sense of how stong a bite comes back after the water cools off, what typically happens?