11-26-2012, 01:39 AM
Had plans to hit the Pig this morning, buddy forgot he was on call for work so we figured we better stay at hyrum. Two other boats at the launch just before daylight, a duck hunter and a trapper, where's all the fishermen?
It was a chilly morning, quite breezy. We wanted to start learning how to use these downriggers. I know hyrum is shallow and can be troller effectively without them, but we wanted to get a feel for them before going to a real lake. It was really slow trolling. We tried pop gear with worms, flatfish, plugs, and jigs....and all of the above without the popgear as well. We tried from 0.8mph up to 2.2 mph with really limited success. Only got a few trolling, so we went upwind and and let the wind drift us along as we jigged with mealies.. This proved much better with lots of 'bows landed, and a few perch and brownies to boot.
Highlight of my day was when a Juvenile bald eagle flew down out of the trees near us, he made 3 blank swoops at the water before grabbing a little planter bow about 40 yards away from us. I got it on video it was really neat.
Anyone ever use rubberbands as their release for a downrigger? We had problems before with getting our clips to release on smaller fish, so we tried rubberbands today. I got some size 32 and 16 bands. The 16 bands only broke a couple times and "released" when a fish hit, but the real advantage I could tell is that you could very easily see if a fish was on, the rubber band atleast stretches a bunch even if it doesn't break so we knew the second we had a strike, even if it was a little 6" planter 'bow. I could see these working really good for the little Kokes at the Pig.
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It was a chilly morning, quite breezy. We wanted to start learning how to use these downriggers. I know hyrum is shallow and can be troller effectively without them, but we wanted to get a feel for them before going to a real lake. It was really slow trolling. We tried pop gear with worms, flatfish, plugs, and jigs....and all of the above without the popgear as well. We tried from 0.8mph up to 2.2 mph with really limited success. Only got a few trolling, so we went upwind and and let the wind drift us along as we jigged with mealies.. This proved much better with lots of 'bows landed, and a few perch and brownies to boot.
Highlight of my day was when a Juvenile bald eagle flew down out of the trees near us, he made 3 blank swoops at the water before grabbing a little planter bow about 40 yards away from us. I got it on video it was really neat.
Anyone ever use rubberbands as their release for a downrigger? We had problems before with getting our clips to release on smaller fish, so we tried rubberbands today. I got some size 32 and 16 bands. The 16 bands only broke a couple times and "released" when a fish hit, but the real advantage I could tell is that you could very easily see if a fish was on, the rubber band atleast stretches a bunch even if it doesn't break so we knew the second we had a strike, even if it was a little 6" planter 'bow. I could see these working really good for the little Kokes at the Pig.
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