Trolling in the heatwave..

Yesterday I had planned to fish with my mate Neil on his Bote, It was going to be a day of trolling our way up and down a river with small deep diving lures. Its more of a numbers game than looking for big fish so its always exciting at the prospects of a fish filled day which really does have the potential to do a tally into the treble figures.

I've only been trolling with Neil a handful of times since he got his boat last year and its a totally different experience which i love. The change of being able to sit down is quite refreshing with lure fishing but you still have the freedom to move about and explore because your in a boat so for me I don't get 'itchy feet' sitting in the same place looking at the same scenery.

Since doing abit of trolling I have started to make my own deep divers, i generally always look to start making my own lures once i start getting into a new field of fishing. I made the lures below especially for deep diving/trolling and finished them in time for my day on the boat with Neil.

 

I got up at 4:20am which incidentally is the time i get up everyday for work, so to be doing it on my weekend off felt a little odd. I shot over to Neils and we were on our way by about 5:15am.

The first thing Neil said when we got in the boat and launched off was 'we will just troll down past these few boats and if we get a fish that means its going to be a good day'. The water was really clear so we were both quite excited. True to his word, it wasn't long before we set off that i got a fish followed not long after by another 2. The average stamp of perch is good here and this set us up for the what we hoped was going to be a belter of a day.

 

 

We fished the first bit as Neil suggested, then turned around and headed upstream, things didn't go as well as we had thought after the initial few fish and it was a little while before Neil found his first.

 

We had pondered on the way if the recent hot temperatures and bright sun would put the fish off to some degree which is why we made the initial decision to go that little bit earlier than we usually would. The more we trolled and the more water we covered with any fish it felt like our worries were starting to become a reality. We reached an area that we knew from the past would always throw up some fish and we had a good little spell here with a flurry of fish, Neil found the best of the day so far with a nice perch.

 

The day did improve to some degree throughout the day and we started to build a tally of fish, it was slow going on the troll and we kept stopping to cast around features on the drift which picked up a few more fish, the average stamp of perch was good but it took a while for the pike to start showing.

 

Neil even managed a pike off the surface which was very much enjoyed followed by a micropike that had a go and was hooked momentarily. By this point we was heading into town with more structure and we had a good tally behind us but with all the boats that the hot weather had attracted it was becoming abit of a nightmare, far too busy and lots of idiots that would not slow down!

Neil had some good perch around the town and a pike that gave him right old run around on his light gear, it was some time before we actually got to see it as it was staying low and kept running.

 

After some time we had had enough of the busy town so thought we would troll our way back, we added to our tally again and we had really had a decent day with a final tally of 54 fish, probably 60% of which were perch and 40% pike. At some points it felt like we was covering too much water with no action at all so it was a funny day, a good days fishing but with that little bit of disappointment in the back of the head that it could have been allot better. i do sometimes think we expect too much but we are not daft and know that there is much more potential to double that kind of tally so it will be really enjoyed when everything does come together.

 

The lure of the day for me was one of my deep divers, after initially testing a few it was evident that we needed to play around with tuning them. I usually do this in the bath with my shallow cranks but its just not deep enough for these kind of divers! The boat is the perfect way of testing them because the sounder will show you what depth it is when they are tripping bottom. In the end we didn't fish with many of the ones I'd made as we were too keen to fish and didn't want to mess about tuning lures. The one below didn't need tuning so i used it abit and it caught me more fish than any others on the day.