My Downrigger Setup & HOW TO USE

0:00 foreign [Music]

0:47 all right everybody welcome back to the channel I figured I'd make this video I probably should have done it a couple years ago but my recent video out trolling for brown trout sparked a few questions oh it's a big brown really nice Brown about downriggers and I've had questions over the years you know there's a lot of similar questions over the years about people that are new to downriggers how I have mine set up how I use them because a lot of people seem to have issues with them and I certainly did when I first started using them and I'll kind of talk you guys through you know the best kind of setup that gives you the the least amount of problems at least that works for me so all right so first of all what are downriggers and what are they even used for you might have seen some of these

1:32 banging around on the back of a boat before or if you're out in the lake you're seeing guys you know trolling around to these things downriggers are basically an easy way to get your line down to a controlled depth on a rod that is better suited for fighting a fish that you can run straight mono on a lot of times a cheaper option is people will run a rod like this A Lead Core rod and this line will sink five feet per color some of the newer stuff sinks eight feet per color so if you're fishing 40 feet deep you could have quite a quite a lot of line out and the rod has to be able to handle the weight of that line plus the fish so you lose a lot of sensitivity and Lead Core

2:18 rods just seem to kind of be on the stiffer side of things so keeping smaller fish pinned landlocked salmon and like brook trout fishing you know some of those fish they're harder to keep pinned on these type of rods so with with that setup you never really know exactly how deep you're getting you can kind of guess but with the downriggers you know exactly how deep that you're trolling and if you have it set up right you can even see exactly how deep you're fishing on your fish finder on your boat so this is what I use for downriggers this is a Canon unitrol 10 it's got the extendable boom on here that's just what I have I have a couple of them I'm not uh you know affiliated with them in any way it's just what I've

3:04 it's just what I use is what I've had for a number of years these are manual downriggers they make some they make all kinds that are electric so you don't have to do any cranking or anything if you're fishing really really deep that's when a lot of guys use the manual ones if you have all the electronics that kind of work together you can connect your electric downrigger to your fish finder and they'll basically go up and down with the Contour of the lake which is is pretty cool but uh these are the manual options so basically what this consists of some of them have rod holders on them like this sometimes you'll use a rod holder mounted back in the in the back side but these unit drill tens are able to mount a rod holder right to it I like that having that right there it works for me you don't have to have another rod holder mounted to the boat I also have these mounted on

3:52 um this is a full tracks Tech system you don't you don't need that I bought that for this boat that has all kinds of different you know attachments for it really nice track system I'll leave them down in the description below because I really love this setup but you don't necessarily need that it just allows me to move the downriggers and all my rod tubes and stuff back and forth I have these mounted on a quick release mounting plate I'll link this downrigger I'll link this plate and everything else that we're using in the description down below so you guys if you want to get a setup just like this all the links will be down below what I like to do is I have a quick release I just turn this screw and I can pop my downriggers right off my boat like this and then I can go put them in the garage or wherever I want to keep them

4:40 so and when I'm ready to fish slide it back on and then tighten the nut the bolt back up here so not only do I have the quick release mounting bracket I really recommend getting the swivel base that allows you to kind of position the downrigger anywhere that you want it off the side of the boat especially if you have other rods out you can kind of swing it out of the way but let me show you here I pulled this pin on this side and this downrigger swings right out to the side like this so you can put it in a bunch of different positions I usually have it I usually have it kind of angled off the back of the boat kind of like that and that way it's not you know getting caught into the the

5:26 prop or anything like that you can kind of Swing the ball out far enough so it's not getting tangled up in anything for fishing in Maine I really like using six eight or ten pound balls you can get them in whatever size you want but I found the eights to be a pretty good like all-around size and I got a 10 on this one for when I'm fishing deeper for lake trout you'll want to size your balls to basically how deep you're fishing and like how fast you're fishing if you're going really much Beyond like 30 feet deep I'd recommend getting a heavier ball I use this 10 pounder when I'm fishing for lake trout you know right along bottom the heavier ball allows it so you're not going to get a lot of blowback and what I mean by that is this

6:13 ball will be down in the water with your line hook to it and if the ball isn't heavy enough it'll be swung way back behind the boat you want to have your downrigger line as straight as possible so that way you know you're getting down to the exact depth if you have a lighter ball and you're trolling kind of fast it might swing back and then you're losing depth So when you buy these they typically come with a braided steel line on here I've switched both of mine over to a braided Dacron line the steel cable is I would assume much stronger but you get a really really loud humming noise and just depends how irritated you get these are almost completely silent when the wind blows and when you're down

7:00 really deep you can get a real Annoying hum sound with the stainless so I switched over to um braided line and I really like it so far I've been using it three years and it works really well so this is kind of what it looks like coming off your boat so one question I get is why is my release so far from the ball but the reason I do that is because I run a snubber in between the ball and the release right here this is a snubber I'll link one down in the description below uh they're specific for downrigger fishing and basically that just allows this ball to kind of Bounce along and it doesn't put as much strain on your downrigger and mount and the other thing is if you get hung up with the ball on bottom and it snaps it's going to snap this this snubber and not snap

7:47 your cable and then you won't lose all this other gear your release swivels clamps and all that stuff it'll just snap it right here you can put on a new snubber and a new ball and you're ready to go a lot of people ask me what releases that I run and I think that's one of the biggest problems that people have is getting their releases to work correctly I've used a bunch of different releases when you buy these a lot of times they come with the clamp style releases and I really hate those that's what I started out with and the biggest complaint that people have is that their releases don't release when they're catching you know brook trout or smaller salmon and trout they'll pick their rods up and there'll be a fish on there and the release never popped off so you've been dragging that fish around half the day and a lot of

8:33 the releases that come with these are really just way Overkill they're made for like Great Lakes fishing for really big fish it takes a lot to set them off so Chamberlain releases as what a lot of people use I'll link these down in the description below and make sure you go and check that link because there's actually two of these that you can get this one is like the inline version then they have a stacker clip which I'll kind of show you in a minute how that works this release right here is in my opinion the best one for at least the fishing around here in New England so the problem is a lot of times when you have the the clamp-on style is that there's only one adjustment so you want to reel your rod down so it's under load but you still want to be light enough so when a fish pulls it it'll release it from the clip and there's kind of that give and

9:18 take between those that sweet spot but with this release you can you can adjust both tensions you can adjust the tension going out to your lure and you can adjust the tension going up to your rod so you can see how this works here you would clip your line into this little clip you can tighten this up as tight as you want so you can crank your rod down really tight get a nice Bend in it and then you can set this to a hair trigger so if a little tiny perch or a little six inch brick trout bites it it'll pull this right out the release will open and your fish will be on I hope I explained that well enough I'll kind of show you how we use it here and how you connect your line to this and everything so let's go check that out so we take our downrigger rod and we've got our lure on the end here we toss that out however many feet

10:03 behind the ball we want to be in most cases you're anywhere from six to maybe 100 feet if you don't know exactly how far off the ball you're going well you can get a line counter reel such as this one right here and then you can strip off as much line as you need and you can see exactly how much line is going out once you get out to however many feet you want you're going to put your ball in the water this handle here acts as a break on this specific downrigger so you would loosen it up a little bit your ball will drop down tighten it up and it stops it's like a clutch I have a little string here that pulls everything close to the boat so you don't have to lean over that far what you want to do is take your line put your rod in the rod holder I have

10:49 bells on this Rod so that's what you're hearing jingling around and then what you're going to do to hook this to your release is you're going to open this clip like that you're going to take your line grab it like this make a loop put your fingers in there twist it around five or so times so you have this this Loop and you're going to hook that Loop inside of this clip here's the clip and there's our Loop close that and lock it and you can see how that line is now hooked into the downrigger release you want to flip the Bale open on your downrigger rod and leave the clicker on so it doesn't backlash having the clicker on makes it so the spool has a little bit of tension

11:35 when you pull it you'll hear the click so leave your bail open and put your thumb right on the line here so I can kind of control it I can release my little rope here so everything kind of goes parallel and then on the downrigger itself it'll have your depth counter and you can calibrate that yourself you can account for the difference in your snubber there the depth counter will tell you how deep you're getting here so if we turn this handle you can watch it go down Crank It Up it goes up

12:22 and then what you want to do with your rod is Engage The handle crank it down fairly tight like this and there you go now you're fishing so you can see here this is what your diameter clip is going to look like in the water the line going straight back will go to your lure the line going up goes to your rod you can crank this down nice and tight so the down pressure you know gets a nice Bend in the rod and you can have this nice and loose so when a brick trout pulls on it it releases the clip and then you're just fighting the fish on the downrigger rod and it's starting to rain so I got to go inside

13:09 I'm glad I'm not out in the boat right now wow now that everything's soaked let's see ah oh yep rained a little okay now that everything's completely soaked try to remember where I left off here I think I showed you guys all the operation of everything here and how to kind of hook your line to the release and how the release Works um like I said I think this is the best release that you can buy for the type of fishing that we do up here anyway oh let me show you what the stacker release clip looks like all right so I just found something else this is another type of release that I used to use that is still much

13:56 better than the old pad style releases that a lot of these downrickers kind of come with um this is a blacks it's very similar to the Chamberlain but it only has that one this one tension screw which still kind of gives you the problem of you know trying to get your Rod crank down nice and tight and uh you know still allowing a smaller fish to pop that release and the reason you want your Rod cranked down tight like that is because there's going to be some slack in that line when that fish pulls your line is straight down and then there's some slack there so that Rod you want to whip up and pick up all that slack and even you know Assist in setting the hook on that fish there's kind of a bunch of different theories some people don't

14:41 like cranking their rod down some people do I crank mine down under tension but I don't get too crazy with it I do try to get it to you know pick up a lot of that slack so Chamberlain also makes this uh stacker release clip it looks very similar to their downrigger release clip and basically what this does it's got the same exact mechanism on there um you've got the top tension and the line going out to your bait tension and this is basically for stacking multiple rods on a downrigger so let's say you want to fish in 30 feet of water and you want to kind of fish the whole water column well this allows you to fish with multiple rods on one downrigger so you'll clip your first line into this drop it down about 15

15:28 feet or halfway down the water column wherever you want to go and then you can take your stacker release you've dropped this down about halfway you will attach the stacker release right to the downrigger line like that and then you can connect your next line to it and then drop all of this down to 30 feet so your bottom ball is at 30 feet so that means this lures at 30 and this one will now be a 15. so you can kind of see how that works you're going to reel your ball up what happens is you start reeling and this has a little mechanism as a little lever here you can use it flip it by hand and it'll allow you to slide this up and down the line but you start reeling

16:14 and as soon as tension gets put on that you can see it slides down so it's all free spooled on the on the line there and then you can just pop it right off pretty easily like that so definitely pick up a couple of these especially if you're fishing with some buddies you can stack multiple rods on one downrigger now talking about rods you don't need anything really that specific you can use an old spinning rod you can use an old trolling rod you can really use anything it's best to use something that's fairly limber that you can kind of load up a little bit I've used a bunch of different rods in the past and I finally have found one that I really like to use the problem with a lot of downrig rods I found is that they're made for fishing Great Lakes and you know huge salmon and trout and stuff so

16:59 up here in Maine they're kind of Overkill but I just started fishing this Rod last year and I bought a second one beginning of this year so now I have two and I've fallen in love with this whole combo it is expensive but it's the best that I've used and I put this in the hands of three or four other buddies and they've all loved it I'll link it down the description below it's the Shimano talora rod with the Dakota 500 um line counter reel and the line count is kind of poor important so you can you know remember where you set your your line back you can kind of keep track of everything and I just spool that with 10 pound mono so that's all I do there this Rod they make a bunch of they make a few

17:44 different models of it this one is the nine foot uh light and then I have I think an eight foot six medium and they are both perfect for this type of stuff you can get much cheaper setup than this you don't need a line counter but it definitely makes for a better experience and I really like it so if you guys are looking for a really nice downrigger Rod set up go check this one out one last thing about downriggers you can see where I've mounted the these on the boat they're a couple feet up but kind of right off the back of the boat so in this way my fish finder that's mounted my transducer that's mounted over on the other side of the boat when both of these balls are are deployed and out you can actually see them both tracking on the fish finder I'll show you guys an

18:30 image of what that looks like so if you're going to permanently Mount these to your boat just make sure that your transducer is picking up both balls when they're deployed that'll just make your life a lot easier and you can actually watch fish come up to the ball and come up to your lure and you can tell if they're interested or not and that'll help you kind of decide well maybe we should try something else for a bait try something else for lure maybe we'll try different depths but uh yeah it's all kind of a learning curve but hopefully some of that information helped you out if I missed anything which I'm sure I did just leave it down in the comments below and I'll get back to you guys everything here is linked in the description below some of this stuff doesn't come with a downrigger like this cable here I think is an optional thing I definitely recommend getting it so you're not leaning way out over the boat be as safe as possible and yeah hope you

19:18 guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching we'll catch you in the next one [Music] thank you