Thanks Jeffhead!

I like to run 3 rods out of our boat. Two on the down riggers and one with a 10 or 12 ounce weight. So far this year we are running around 50/50 for keepers. The down riggers seem to pick up more shakers and lots of bottom fish but when the other rod gets hit it's almost always a 7-10 pound fish. Could be the flashers though since we haven't changed them around much.

I agree about the percentages. But i am always messing with how deep my downrigers are. When I mark bait I will raise or lower to run to the bottom of the bait balls. But in the morning early at first light I am always shallow and it is when I catch the majority of the nice sized keepers. During high sun yeah I run on the bottom almost always. I like to vary depth allot more when I have another guy in the boat, mostly fish alone.

Thanks StormN, nice to have help from the computer literate - lets try this again:



JasonS, it sounds like you do about what I do - I chase the bottom of the bait balls with my booger ball also - except for the bit about trolling shallow in the early AM - now I do that for returning fish all the time, but almost never for blackmouth, although I will admit my first fish this year was caught in the dark on opening day under a shallow stack of bait at about 32 feet. But that was bait and fish chasing - yep, saw him right there - never about heading down the drift shallow. But y'know, that one and one other on the bottom but at the shallow end of the drift were the only two I hooked at 0 dark 30 so far this year, so you may be onto something.

When I do fish shallow, or if I have a crowd and someone needs to flatline, I use a diver instead of a big chunk of lead - I've got a 4 ouncer that will dive as deep as a pound of lead and is a lot more fun if you get a fish on.

Sure are lots of blackmouth ideas to go around

Yeah GutZ, check out that Scotty site, they have lots of good info there. Basically you just need an accurate voltmeter (to the .01V) and you touch your negative lead to your negative battery terminal and your positive lead to your downrigger wire. Make sure you're away from other boats, don't do it in a marina, etc., and don't do it in freshwater or near a river mouth, the salinity of the water affects the reading. Other than that, it's pretty simple, unless you have an off reading (way too high or too low), which means you have to track down the source of the problem, ie., bad bonding, grounding, wiring, etc... which can get complicated.

And rcl187, as far as not catching fish on the downriggers and catching fish on the weighted line, let me guess, are those Cannon downriggers with the "Auto-stop" feature when the ball gets to the surface? If so, that's your problem. Those particular downriggers put a charge on the downrigger cable, and sense when the ball has broken the surface of the water... some sort of ground fault circuit. What this means is, every time you raise those downriggers, you are putting over 7.0V+ on the downrigger cable, TOTALLY pushing fish away from the cables... salmon don't like voltages much over 0.8V+, never mind more than SEVEN times that.

I just talked to a guy a week ago, he told me on his last boat, he would catch 80% of his fish on one downrigger, not the other... at first I thought he meant coho, and that could be attributed to which side the kicker motor was on, but he was talking about blackmouth, fishing 120 feet down... so I asked him what kind of downriggers he had at the time, and he said, "One Scotty, one Cannon"... and the Scotty caught 80% of the fish, because the Cannon had the 7.0V+ auto-stop feature. He has two Scottys now and catches fish equally on both. Just and interesting thought...

-N.