Mega Byte

Earlier this year emailed the DNR about making the location of the nets available online and to complain that some I've seen are very poorly marked. Here was their response:

We plan to go out Aug 4 & 5. Let me know how you do.

Just noticed this post reads totally different on the app than on the website. The 'at mentions' mess up the app. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G870A using Great Lakes Fisherman Mobile App

Pentwater 7/21 AM, 8 for 9 Fished by my dad and two of my boys for a morning trip. Started setting lines around 7 and fished until noon. Things slowed up just after 10 am. We worked water between 95 and 170 feet deep on an East/West troll and took fish both directions. Ended up with 2 kings (15#, 12#), 2 coho and 4 steelhead. A white paddle and pickled sunshine fly down 70 took fish in 130 fow and 145 fow. A double orange crush on a 100 Cu took a steelhead on a 158 fow A blue haze paddle and meat on a 300 Cu took a stealhead in 158 fow (it was a double with the 100 Cu above). Had a big rip on a mixed veggie spoon on a rigger down 65 in 138 fow. That was the fish we lost. The hot bait for us was a standard size Natural Born Killer (NBK) spoon (regular size) on a 250 copper. It took 4 fish. (I can't recall all of the depths for this bait, but I know we did get 1 king in 98 fow.) Based on some of the other discussions on this forum, I did a few things different for this trip that I think helped us out. First, I put fluorocarbon leaders on everything except my diver rods. (Thanks @Boomer for starting that thread.) I started with 20 Berkeley Vanish, but after buying it found a lot of people the weren't happy with it. So I never even tried it. Instead, I upgraded to 20 pound Seaguar. I was breaking a lot of knots tying these leaders on and I just wasn't happy with it. I was wetting them really good like you have to with fluoro, and tying them slow to avoid the fluoro burn, but I got way too many breaks during my testing to feel confident about using this line. Once I did get a knot tied, it looked solid, but it made me nervous because of all the previous breaks. I thought this line could even more get expensive if I start losing fish and setups because of breaks. Plus, it was breaking when I lifted my 19# cannonballs, so I didn't have a lot of faith in it. I will probably add it to the end of my walleye poles. So I did more research. Seaguar seemed to get a lot of love from people. The vast majority of people were very happy with it. P-Line was popular too. I opted for 30 pound Gamma Clear Leader Material. It had a breaking strength of 41 pounds. Most fluorocarbons I looked at had an actual breaking strength (in test studies) that was 80% to 90% of what the line was actually rated for. Granted, most of these studies were done with lighter (10# and 15#) test line. It seemed to be less of an issue with higher pound lines. It's not fair to compare a 30# Gamma with a 20# Seaguar. Maybe I would have been happy with the 30# Seaguar. I ended up with the Gamma and I was very happy with the knot strength and breaking strength. I never broke a knot when testing. We didn't get into any huge fish today. The kings at 15 pounds and 12 pounds were our biggest fish. But, everything held together just fine. I read in some other forums where guys thought fluorocarbon was a waste of money. A lot of people said "salmon aren't leader shy". Sure, I'll buy that, at least some of the time. But I think we have a lot more fish following our lures that don't bite, rather than the ones that do. I've seen this on a lot of underwater videos where the salmon will trail the bait, but never hit it. I heard of a story about a charter captain who added cameras to his lines so people could see what was going on live under the water. What a great idea! He ended up taking them down because so many fish were trailing, investigating and not hitting. People kept asking, "why aren't they hitting?" and they were wondering if he was any good at his job. Those are the fish I was after. If fluorocarbon could help me close the deal with some of those less aggressive fish, great. But, it needs to do that with good knot integrity and without breaking after a hookup. Hopefully we'll see how the Gamma holds up with bigger fish, but I was very happy with how it performed today. The other thing I did different was add a color of lead core to the end of my coppers based on a recommendation by @The Greek . I used 27# TufLine MicroLead which claims to be "30% smaller and 3 times stronger". Man, trying to tie a knot with that was tricky. I finally found something worked well - consistently well - and I was happy with how the Pb performed. The 250 Cu that took 4 fish today actually had 2 colors of Pb after the copper (by accident), and then the fluorocarbon leader. There are a lot of knots in that setup, but I was confident everything would hold based on my trials and testing of the various knots. So we had good action this morning. Most of the morning we fished with only 6 lines in the water because we kept pulling fish in and I could get the other lines out. (It took the kids a while to get some of these fish in, especially on that 250 Cu.) I can't prove it with such a small sample size, but I think the Pb and fluorocarbon helped my cause today. I did put a couple of wire divers out and they didn't get touched all morning. And photos for @Martin1950:

It's nice to hear some good sized kings are starting to show up. Thanks for the report.

I don't lengthen mine. I can see why someone would though...just to isolate the trailer even more. Seems like a good idea, especially if you are making your own.

I run meat rigs behind spin doctors, 10" flashers and the larger 12" flashers. I always use the tinsel teasers with whatever length the manufacture assembled them in. I don't make my own. I will usually run the meat on my 200 coppers and below. Some of the meat heads are designed for full herring, not strips. I always fish with strips and I've made the mistake of buying some that are designed to hold a full herring head. I've used them with strips, but honestly I don't recall how well they have produced compared to the ones designed for strips. I've got a 10" spotted dick flasher that produces well on a wire diver for me. And a 12" blue haze flasher that I will run on a 200, 250 or 300 copper that works well. I'd like to get Kevin's Girlfriend in the water, but they always seem sold out of those when I look for them.

Cannon Big Boards $60 plus shipping for both. I've only used them a couple of times, but they worked great. There is nothing wrong with them. They will ship from zip code 49337.

I just ordered some pulleys to test with. https://www.ronstan.us/marine5/product.asp?prodno=RF103 https://alltackle.com/malin-single-outrigger-pulley/ The Malin one I picked up because it was tiny, had a metal sheave and a built in clip. For the other one, it's about 1.75" tall and it's designed to pull wire/cable. I talked to the folks at Ronstan because they offer a wide variety of pulleys for kites, outriggers, sailboats, etc. This was the one they recommended based on how I want to use it.

2.5 at the ball, give or take. I don't have a kicker motor, so I'm trolling with my big 250 hp outboard. I've got trolling bags, but I've only used those for walleye. Usually I try to keep it in the 2.3 to 2.9 range.

@TyeeII I'm glad you signed up to comment! It's a great site and a lot of guys here really know their stuff. Your post makes me want to experiment with a 24# shark weight. How deep do I want to get? I don't know, maybe 120 feet to 170 feet. I know some guys will have special gear and they'll put cannonballs down 250' - 300'. I didn't feel I had any way to do that without a significant upgrade in gear, and heck, I might want to try that sometime. But, I'd rather have a kicker motor and autopilot before I get new riggers and my wife says she gets a new house before I get a kicker motor. So I'm trying to think of another way for me to get deep without stressing out my rigger motors or having to buy new riggers. My boat has a swim platform and an outboard, so I can't easily net fish right off the back. So I net them on the corners. I know I could pull a rigger up to get it out of the way, but if I can find a solution to avoid that, why not try? So that is one reason to not want the blow back. When I ran mine last weekend at 90' down, so 180' of cable, there wasn't any blow back to speak of. I am sure at some amount of cable, the surface area of the cable wouldn't be overcome by the weight of the cannonball. One option for that is to switch from stainless steel to braid. You don't want to bounce bottom with a braid, but it would cut down on surface area issue. 100lb Pound Test Power Pro Maxcutatro braid is 0.017 Inches Diameter. 150 pound test stainless steel is .031. (I believe that is uncoated, so coated stainless would be larger.) So if you run two braided lines, it would be like having like .034 diameter. So it's 9.67% more surface area for two strands of braid vs a single strand of cable, but that second strand allows you to use twice as much weight. So 9.67% more surface area, but 100% more weight. But again, I'd never purposely bounce bottom with it. As far as wear and tear on the rigger, that is a fair point and I'm not sure of the answer to that. I would think pulling more weight, even at fewer feet would be harder on it, but that's just an opinion and obviously depends on the weight, just like pulling more cable at a lesser weight being easier on it would depend on the weight. I appreciate your insight. Maybe there's a reason no one is doing this. I'll play around with it for a bit this summer and see how it goes. I'm not afraid to fail miserably, but with the right tweaks, it might just work. I think finding the right pulley will be important. I'm looking into outrigger pulleys, or finding something more suited for small diameter cable. What I am using now is designed for small diameter rope. Maybe a spare pulley off an existing rigger would do the trick. Lots of experimenting to do.

The physics is right on this. It's a two pulley design, so the force applied to my rigger motor will be half the cannonball weight. So my 19 pounders won't be an issue now for my motor. But going larger than that I think we need to consider the ability of the downrigger base and gunwale interface to be able to support a heavier weight, especially in rougher waters. For now I think I will be content knowing I can run my heavy (19#) cannonballs without it causing issues with my downrigger motors.

At some point an engineer is going to come on here and just smack us for making a mockery of their profession. So I was just thinking, the anchor side of the triangle read 13 pounds 3 ounces. It's illogical in my (non-engineering) brain to think that the other side of the triangle would also be supporting 13 pounds 3 ounces also, since there isn't 26 pounds, 6 ounces hanging there. So I would think the other side of the triangle, so the side the rigger is actually pulling up would be the actual cannonball weight minus the weight that is supported by the rigger base anchor point. So in this case that would 18 pounds 13 ounces minus 13 pounds 3 ounces, so the force on the rigger side would be 5 pounds 10 ounces. I think this might be possible because my rigger arms aren't flat, they angle up. So my anchor point where the scale was is lower than the opposite corner where the rigger wire comes down from the rigger pulley and towards the cannon ball. So the ball is shifted towards the anchor point since it is lower. The ball isn't perfectly centered because my rigger arm isn't flat. But I think the lower the cannonball goes, the more this would probably even out and the closer each side would be to supporting half of the weight of the cannonball.

Because a $3 pulley is cheaper than new riggers. The boat is the barn so I did a little experiment using my fish scale. With a direct connection to a single cable - so no pulley - the cannonball weighed 18 lbs, 13 ounces. Then I attached the pulley and put the scale between the pulley and the anchor point the on rigger. The weight recorded was 13 lbs, 3 ounces. So it didn't cut it in half like I was thinking. It makes me wonder if the angles of that triangle makes a difference. So maybe that weight (force) would be less the lower the ball got? Just another thing to experiment with I guess. Pictures attached.

I can put down a 28 lb cannonball, but because of the pulley, it would be easier to pull up. Or maybe I don't have the pulley set up right to make that actually work? It would be good to run this past an engineer, which I am not. But the concept is through the use of pulleys it makes it easier to pull the weight up. So if I lose power, it would feel like I am in still pulling up 14 pounds of weight, just like I was before I switched to a heaver cannonball. The other end of that triangle is supporting some of the weight, but that is my non-engineering brain thinking. Now granted, I would have more cable to pull, but it's not like it would feel like pulling up 28 pounds hanging directly from a single cable. (And it's not like we have to pull these by hand a very often...) I also have leather gloves on board just in case I have to do this. But your question makes me think I should research the exact setup needed to make it easier to pull the weight. Let out 160 to go down 80...imagine a triangle, with the point facing down. This is where the cannonball is. For every 10 feet of cable you let down, 5 feet goes to the left of the cannonball and five feet goes to the right. So I have to let out 10 feet to get a 5 foot drop in my cannon ball.

Heavy cannonball, pulley & a rigger So earlier this year I took one of my cannon downriggers in for service. It wasn't pulling my cannonballs up as quickly as usual and I wanted it looked at before it decided to stop entirely on me. The service rep asked how heavy a cannonball I use. My small ones are 10 pounds, but the larger ones, that I like to use when the fish are deep are 19 pounds. He explained that the 19 pounder is to heavy. I pointed out that according to the owners manual, they are rated for 20 pounds. He said, "Well, they will lift 20 pounds for a while, but they will wear out a lot foster. You need to use lighter cannonballs." I didn't want to use lighter cannonballs. If I'm trying to fish 75' down or deeper, I prefer to use my heavy cannonballs to minimize the blow back. So on my last trip out I tried something new. I wanted to share this in case someone wants to improve on it. I haven't seen it done before. There were some pros and cons, so I wanted to share how this experiment went. I integrated a pulley with my downrigger setup. I used one that had a pin on it so I could easily remove the pin, add the pulley to my rigger and not have to take anything apart. The swivel on my cannonball wire that normally attaches to the cannonball, I clipped to the hook at the base of my rigger. I put the pulley on the cable that spanned the area where the cable leaves the rigger and where the cable attaches to the terminal great for the rigger. I attached an "S" hook to the pulley, followed by my release and then the cannonball. This created a triangle with my rigger wire. On the other side of the boat I integrated my fishhawk with that set up. (In one of the attached pictures, I wrapped my ball retrieval cord around the rigger arm to try and get it out of the way for the picture. So if you're wondering what the heck that is, it's just to get it out of the way.) The thought is by using the pulley, I can still use my 19 pound weights, but to my rigger, it will feel like it is pulling up 9.5 pounds. I will get the benefit of having a heavy cannonball and my rigger motor will feel like it's pulling up a very small weight. My though was if this worked, I'd get some 28 - 30 pound cannon balls. It will still be easy on my rigger motor, but should really limit blowback and help me get my baits deep. So obviously when I lowered the cannonball down and raised it up, it was slower. I didn't think that was a big deal. (In my opinion, some of those riggers are to fast on the drop anyway.) Also, just as obvious, if you want your cannonball 80' down, then let out 160' of cable. On one side of the boat, I didn't have any issues at all. Everything worked great and I put my cannonball down 90' with very little blow back. On the other side of the boat, the set up with the probe, it had a couple of issues. The first is down around 70' and below we lost signal with the probe. I had new batteries in it, but they were new last summer and they spent the winter in the boat. So I'm not sure if it was a battery issue, or if maybe the pulley blocked or interfered with the signal between the probe and the transducer. The second issue, and this only happened once and it happened on the probe side, is it appears the rigger cable got stuck somewhere on the pulley. After the cannonball was down for a bit, we decided to lower it even more. The cable between the pulley and my rigger base remained very tight. However, the cable between the pulley and the end of the rigger became loose. It's like the pulley was stuck on the cable and was no longer rolling on it. When I brought it back up to the surface, it was operating like normal. On my next trip out, I will test this again with fresh batteries to see if it resolves my probe signal issue. Overall, I was happy with the performance and I don't see why this wouldn't work even better with a 28 or 30 pound cannonball. Having two rigger wires in the water seemed to be easily overcome by the heavier weight. Anyway, just wanted to share this since it seems like the fish are really deep right now. Maybe someone can find a way to improve it.

i'll be in Pentwater tomorrow. I'm not sure how for "up north" is, but if you're in the area, let me know how your doing.