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Monster striped bass like this one weighing 50-plus pounds caught by Larry Stone of Pine Bluff are sometimes taken by trolling on a number of Arkansas lakes. (Joe Mosby photo) Talking about trolling in Arkansas Saturday, Feb 23, 2008 By Joe Mosby It is debatable how the term "troll" came into our language. For some Arkansans, it means a mythical character living under a bridge. To others, it means to fish with a bait slowly pulled through the water. Never mind. We'll just skip the under-bridge character and talk about fishing. Trolling can be a highly productive method along with a being preliminary step, a locating procedure, toward conventional casting for fish. Trolling has been around forever, though not in the form we are familiar with today. Anglers long ago learned that moving around was often a key to catching fish, that the fish didn't always come to where you were fishing from the bank. That's why the ancients started fishing from boats. By drifting with the current of a stream or with wind's propulsion, fishermen found out they could cover more territory. A second factor was the bait appeared to be live, to have natural action if it was moving slowly through the water. But fishermen didn't always want to go downstream or to travel in the direction of the wind. So they used quietly worked paddles to help out. Motors for boats were developed, and anglers worked them at the slowest speed to pull baits through the water. Then the invention of the electric trolling took place. Notice the device is called a trolling motor. Today's fishermen are inclined to view it as a tool for putting and keeping a bass boat in the desired position, but trolling is why the battery-powered motors were created. Name any fish we've got in Arkansas, and you can catch 'em by trolling. Oh, maybe that's stretching the point a bit. Trolling probably won't help you snag a paddlefish, but with the suitable bait and hook, you can catch walleye, striped bass, white bass, crappie, black bass, even bream and catfish by trolling. You can catch trout by trolling. Trolling may be the No. 1 technique in walleye fishing, if not in Arkansas, in the upper Midwest, the most popular walleye territory. Today's knowledgeable fisherman often combines his trolling work with a careful eye on a depth finder in front of him or her. With the slowly moving boat propelled by an electric trolling motor or a small gasoline outboard, the angler can follow channels with the depth finder, working the edges, the dropoffs or the middle. When a fish is caught, the fisherman can look for water of similar depth. The fisherman can also find and make note of suspended fish by trolling and using a depth finder. Charlie Hoke, who operates Charlie's Hidden Harbor on the Arkansas River near Oppelo, which is near Morrilton, is a practitioner of drift fishing for catfish. He catches some nice ones by pulling baits slowly through the bends and other haunts of river cats. Trolling adds to the process. The troll-drift process on the river, where current is a factor, lets the angler work through areas likely to have natural food for catfish. On the bends, this is on the inside edge of the bends, where food is carried by the current. When Hoke works through a spot like this, then his practice is to fire up the big motor, go back upstream and come through it again, or move to another spot. Far from being limited to big water like our open man-made lakes and the Arkansas River, trolling is used in places like stump-filled Lake Conway. Crappie are often the object here. If you have looked at Lake Conway during a drawdown, you saw a scene of thousands and thousands of stumps. But the stumps were not bank to bank. There are plenty of open areas, some of them small, on Lake Conway. Trolling isn't practiced by everyone on Conway. Most crappie chasers dunk minnows or jigs, and sometimes they combine the two, by working from stump to stump. But what if the crappie aren't holding tight to stumps? What if the crappie are on the move? Trolling sometimes finds them. Another technique is to work an area of a lake in a gridiron pattern, making parallel passes one direction then another. Crank baits, minnow or "stick" baits, spoons, jigs and spinners are all candidates for trolling work. -------- Joe Mosby is the retired news editor of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and Arkansas' best known outdoor writer. His work is distributed by the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. He can be reached by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com. |
