bigted

That's all fine. Been at this a while myself. Good point regarding the drag tension vs the amount of line on the spool. Many overlook that. I'll just say if you are dipping the rod and reeling - while the fish is taking line (or in a stalemate leaning on you) - you are giving the fish an opportunity to take advantage of slack line on a turn, and wasting a ton of effort to boot. My OP was to point out that there is fish fighting instruction going on in that video, and at the same time poor drag management going on over and over. One more question: Do you think "side pressure" makes a bit of difference when there's 150+ feet of line out there ? Tight lines.

Watch the video. I'm talking about reeling against the drag and not gaining any line.

You give fish fighting tips in the video, but I think I saw you dead reel against drag 50 times.

https://instigatorsportfishing.com Captain Al Sauerland. Great guy. Sent from my iPhone using Lake Ontario United

Dipsies aren't popping prematurely. Mine was out 250 on a 2 setting yesterday when it happened. We were running 2.6 over ground (2.8 at the ball) when it happened yesterday. I think it makes great sense that we haven't been keeping the copper behind the boat until it drags for a while, letting it come up in the water column a bit before sending it out. We were hitting a lot of fish yesterday and when it's like that we are anxious to get the coppers out on the boards and out of the way...

Dipsies aren't popping prematurely. Mine was out 250 on a 2 setting yesterday when it happened. We were running 2.6 over ground (2.8 at the ball) when it happened yesterday. I think it makes great sense that we haven't been keeping the copper behind the boat until it drags for a while, letting it come up in the water column a bit before sending it out. We were hitting a lot of fish yesterday and when it's like that we are anxious to get the coppers out on the boards and out of the way...

More excellent suggestions. Thanks Gentlemen.

Thanks for the input so far. We're running big boards (not inline) so letting them running further back the chute before sending them outside the dipsies is not an option. It could well be an issue of having them get into each other while turning, as we never realize they are tangled until we retrieve one or the other. (board line or dipsy) As I said, it's not happening all the time so there has to be some other X-factor at play. Maybe current ? If we run the copper out without the dipsy deployed, they do NOT tangle. We run our boards out far enough to keep them outside the dipsies IMHO. We thought changing to a "2" setting as opposed to a "3" on dipsies would fix things, as the dipsies run straighter down (and closer to the boat), but as I said it happened again anyway.

Hoping someone here can help with a problem we're having with our coppers: This never used to be an issue, and we cannot figure out why it is now. When we launch our 300 and 400 coppers out the back of the boat, then send them out on the planer lines over our wire dipsies (one each side), the dipsies are getting into the coppers sporadically, and I'm sure you can imagine or have seen the mess it causes. I've been on other boats where this never happens - in fact, I've never seen it until this year, and we just dealt with another mess today. Our first thought was that we were running spoons on the coppers, and they don't produce enough drag, causing the coppers to sink too quickly and find the dipsies. Well, today we ran flasher-flies on them and had it happen again. Even worse actually because spin doctors spin LOL. We try to make sure to run the copper out with some drag, but that's not the fix either. We've also began running the dipsies on a 2 setting instead of the usual 3, but that doesn't fix the problem. Any insight as to why this is happening and/or advice to prevent it ? As of now, our fix is to pull the dipsy, launch the copper, and then re-launch the dipsy. It's a royal pain. Any help would be greatly appreciated !