Difference of opinion on trolling

[MAKO19]

Always keep moving forward when hooked up. One more thing when you do clear the riggers let them hang from the clips so the bait is going in and out of the water. Also, clear the flats but don't bring them in the boat, leave them in the wash if you can until you need to bring them in when the fish is boat side. I have seen yellowfin and longfin come up and explode on ballyhoo dangling from the riggers and the spreader bars or whatever else trailing behind the boat in the wash before we brought it in.

[Captain Fred Archer]

I consider leaving lures, bars, or baits in the water (on the longs and usually ballyoo or ProSquids in my case) part of fighting the fish. And we often picked up extra fish on them, especially when we got the fish hooked on the other stuff near the boat and there were some followers. But me, I don't even think about the rest of a school until I have dealt with the fish that we have hooked up. Only after we've landed those first fish, including some that bit while we were fighting the original hookups, did I go back for more. I have already described our ways of doing that.

Here's some more information on how we went about doing things from an earlier post about bait & switch fishing below...

"We did not have any hook baits or lures in the pattern, the reason being that some very big fish used to climb all over them, so we had to run them on big gear, just in case. But that defeated some of the best aspects of the technique – such as matching the tackle to the size of the fish and picking out which size and species we wanted to catch, or just as importantly, not catch. That is a big part of the versatility and beauty of bait and switch fishing in the first place. We simply didn't want to hook the sails, smaller marlin, or other, smaller pelagics on the howitzers that were right for the big gorilla's, but wrong for the dinks, so there were no hook baits in the water when we were fishing the teaser bars and so there were no tackle versus fish size mistakes. This too was better for our customers from the standpoint of fighting and catching their fish on the appropriate size gear.

There’s another really neat thing about pure, no-armed lure bait and switch bar fishing. It is the opposite of that last situation, this time not taking chances of hooking big fish on gear too light for them. Considering the fact that there was a terrific alternative to that, plus the fact that we were in a diverse species fishery with a broad mix of species’ and sizes, bait & switch was perfect for us.

Restrictive limits on meat species also dictated that we didn’t waste a lot of them catching them once those limits were achieved. And coupled with customers who were sometimes not interested in certain fish, but only one, like marlin, sails, tuna, big bulls, or even wahoo, that ability to not get caught with our tackle pants down when it came to what we hooked on what tackle was simply terrific for us and them.

Heck, this was Cabo in the old days, when it wasn’t just possible, it wasn’t unusual at all to have customers get flat worn out from catching bills or tuna and not wanting to catch any more of one or the other, or even both, instead preferring to go for some dorado or maybe a wahoo. It was easy and fun (remember, fishing is supposed to be fun) to accommodate them by bait and switch fishing and if a big tuna or maybe a blue showed up and they changed their minds and wanted to go for it, it was a simple matter of just grabbing the right rig, pitching it and we’d wind up going backwards far more often than not! I call that having your cake and eating it too! And the fact is, many times that same “no more of those” thing still applies to marlin in particular to this day down there."

"! I'll never put a lure or bait in the water without a hook in it!" Uh, well, okay, if you say so...

[zar2754]

its simple really.

leave as many lures in the water as possible. while fighting a fish.

it does a couple things, allows the opportunity for multiple hook ups and saves time when re-deploying the spread.

having someone experienced on the sticks is important


i believe that the angler should not have to shuffle all about the **** pit but instead the capt should keep the fish where he wants it by positioning the boat accordingly

clearly on big fish, when a run/back down or chase must ensue, you need to clear all lines.

on the boats i fish on, depending on the target species usually we troll 2-6 lines (bft) and 8-14 lines (yft)

mako hit on a very good point, when clearing the riggers, whether it be spreader bar, hoo, or lure leave it just dangling in the water.