It’s an age-old question, faced frequently by those with a penchant toward chasing walleyes: when should I troll, and when should I cast? Certainly, there is no singular “best” way to catch ol’ marble-eyes, but under many conditions, one technique – either casting or trolling – has the potential to dramatically outperform the other.
When to troll
Trolling is, by definition, a water-coverage technique, and for the purposes of this article, I’ll lump “speed trolling” techniques, like summer crankbaits, together with “finesse trolling” techniques, like live-bait rigging, under this one presentation category. During the course of any one day spent trolling, your baits will be washed through more water, and potentially be in front of more eyeballs, than during a day spent casting. But that doesn’t mean that you should troll all of the time. Here are some circumstances under which trolling truly shines.
1. Find fish on an unfamiliar body of water.
First time visiting someplace new? Study the map and then break out the trolling rods. Learn as you fish – watch your fishfinder for concentrations of bait and fish, and drop waypoints whenever a rod pops. You’d be surprised how quickly you can put together a viable pattern by covering water.
2. Scattered fish over a large area.
When fish are widely distributed over a significant area, whether it is a shallow flat in a lake, the deep outside bend in a river, or even suspended over a deep basin, then trolling is the best way to contact more of those fish during the course of your trip. The same rationale applies when active fish have concentrated themselves along a long, distinct breakline – whether that break is a depth change (a dropoff) or a structural element (a weedline or a rip-rap wall). Get baits behind the boat, dial up an appropriate speed with your kicker or electric trolling motor, and go.
3. Precise depth control.
By virtue of the contemporary walleye-catching tools available to us, trolling offers an opportunity to enjoy more precise depth control for our baits, keeping them in the target zone longer - and more consistently - than baits presented by cast-and-retrieve cycles. Bottom bouncers and old school “Wolf River Rigs” are great for keeping spinners or small crankbaits just off the bottom. One ounce of weight for every 10 feet of water depth is what you want to shoot for. Leadcore offers flexible and predictable depth control for a wide variety of lures. One color of leadcore (10 yards) provides about five feet of depth at a speed of 2 mph, so if you want your lure to run 20 feet down, you need about 4 colors of lead in the water. Flatline trollers use published dive curves for crankbaits to select just the right bait, deployed on the correct amount of line, to hit a target depth. This level of precise depth control is not really accessible to the angler casting and retrieving, unless their target depth is “the bottom” – then, a jig and bait, or a jigging rap, will out them where they want to be.
4. Multiple line presentations.
In states where anglers are allowed to use multiple lines at once, trolling is one the best ways to manage them. For example, an angler presenting two lures can troll one near the bottom with leadcore, and a second higher in the water column by flatline trolling a shallow diver – now, we’ve covering two different depths at the same time, while minimizing the risk of tangles. Two anglers running four lines? Two leadcore lines off the back corners, and two flatlines or planar board lines. More anglers or lines than that? Break out the boards and trolling trees. Good luck managing all of those lures, and dealing with fish, tangles, and snags if everyone is casting instead.