It’s been more than 25 years since Gary Gehrman rocked my trolling world.
Prior to that day in the boat, I had always associated planer boards with trolling for Great Lakes trout and salmon. Walleyes, after all, bit on jigs and rigs along the edges of structure and on crankbaits fished in the shallows. After spending a few hours trolling down the middle of the lake with Gehrman, walleye fishing was never the same.
That’s what happens when you catch big fish in the middle of nowhere with the help of planer boards. Something has to give, and, chiefly, it’s your carved-in-stone attitude regarding where and how to catch walleyes that does.
Gehrman has since experimented with planer boards under a plethora of conditions. As with many things in fishing, some of his tactics have remained the same. Other new developments, however, have risen to the forefront. It’s the balance of those new and old techniques that allows an angler to advance planer-board skills.
The Classics Never Go Out of Style
Walleye fishing with planer boards originated when Gehrman and a few early pioneers began trolling wooden Rover trolling boards in open water for walleyes. Since then, a number of plastic board designs have become popular, largely due to their ease of manufacture, durability and cost-efficiency over the old-style, handcrafted wooden boards. Even the Rovers of today are molded from plastic, with a foam insert for flotation.
Most modern planer-board releases feature rubber pads that are clamped to the line. Today’s trollers prefer to hook fish, reel in the line, detach the board by hand and then fight the fish in the rest of the way. No one wants to use the old-style release mechanism that pops off the line when a fish strikes, which forces the angler to go back and pick up the board after he lands the fish.
No one, of course, except Gehrman.
Recall that, back in the day, there weren’t GPS systems or waypoints on electronic maps. Everything had to be done manually. So it makes sense that anglers used detached boards to mark areas where fish were hooked so they could circle back and do it all over again. Yet that’s not why Gehrman continues to fish with his old wooden versions. It’s that he still finds them uniquely effective.
“One of the biggest advantages I find with the old wooden boards is how sensitive they are,” Gehrman says. “If a fish barely bumps or touches your bait, the board doesn’t just lag momentarily like a plastic board – it rocks. I find them to produce far more recognizable visible clues than the newer plastic versions. The Tattle Flag options developed for planer boards by Off Shore Tackle certainly help in this regard, adding visual sensitivity to your trolling presentations. But for my money, after staring at boards for more than 30 years, I prefer the old wooden standbys.”
In a nutshell, Gehrman uses his boards not just to troll lures, but also as bobbers. Picture how fish twitch and play with baits and how bobbers respond with subtle visual clues that betray the presence and feeding attitudes of the fish. That’s a huge part of planer-board fishing. If his lures are getting bumped but not eaten, Gehrman is alerted by the sensitivity of the wooden boards that his lures are at the right depth but something is a little off. With that information he can then experiment with trolling speed, surges and pauses, and lures until he puts together the right combination that converts lookers into hooked fish.
This doesn’t mean every angler should run out and buy antique wooden planer boards to catch open-water walleyes. It’s important to study different boards and how they react on the water. Whether they’re wooden or plastic, watch boards for the slightest visual changes that indicate the presence of fish: bites, bumps, tow-alongs or actual strikes.
Classic Lures and Classic Speeds
In addition to wooden planer boards, the lures Gehrman trolls behind his boards haven’t changed much since the beginning. They’re all crankbaits.
“I’ve tried trolling every lure under the sun for walleyes, and they all work to varying degrees at times,” he says. “But day in and day out, the single most consistent thing I find about trolling crankbaits for walleyes is that the slower you go, the more you tend to get bit. For me, a lure that will run not just at 1 to 1.5 mph, but much slower than that, has a huge advantage over those that require faster trolling speeds to work properly.”
That aspect presents a daunting challenge to anglers who troll large lakes for offshore walleyes. In those lakes, walleyes have room to roam. There is only so much time in a lifetime to locate and catch them. So here’s the deal: Do everything you already normally do to locate walleyes – scout with electronics, lay down trolling patterns through fish you see on your screen, experiment with every factor you can imagine. But before you leave an area with apparent good potential, but no fish response, at least try a major slowdown to maybe 0.5 mph. It’s more likely to produce fish than a major increase in speed, or so Gehrman’s experience suggests.
Gehrman’s favorite lure for slow-trolling is an old Whopper Stopper Hellcat. Good luck finding one, though, as they have virtual disappeared from the market. You’ll instead have to experiment with modern mimics. Consider the intriguing case of jointed lures. A joint doesn’t just give a lure a seductive wobble. It also allows for easy motion between the two lure sections, enabling the lure to continually self-correct to changes in speed in order to continue running true. This allows a jointed lure to run across a wider speed range than a solid lure, from very fast, down to very, very slow.
The other interesting dimension to both slow and fast trolling comes with lures that are at least somewhat humpbacked in style. These range from old banana lures such as Lazy Ikes and FlatFish to curved-bodied minnow lures such as Reef Runners and Rapala Tail Dancers. As a group, they have exaggerated actions and tend to run through a wider speed range than straighter-bodied lures. Not just faster, but also slower.
Lipped humpback-minnow lures trolled behind planer boards with snap weights are about as simple as lures get for walleyes. Just by turning the boat in gentle S-shaped trolling patterns you can put the lures through speed ranges from fast to downright creepy-crawly.
Meanwhile, the classic banana-lure category may be more intriguing for slow-trolling with planer boards for the simple fact that no one uses them and they have all the characteristics to work. The fact that they wiggle more than other lures at slow speeds is the main reason why it might be worthwhile to experiment with them.
Alternative Strategies for Trolling Boards
Most anglers simply use boards to spread their lures far and wide, often allowing them to cover various depth ranges, even on tapering flats. They will toss them out on either side of the boat in a balanced formation – typically two to port, two to starboard – and just troll away. But if walleye tournament trails have shown us anything, it’s that there are plenty of creative ways to troll with boards.
Shallow water was once thought of only as a casting area, but not anymore. Trolling shallow-running lures above or barely tickling weed tops, occasionally nicking rocky bottom or simply running free at mid-depth, is a pattern that is rapidly catching on in some circles. Shallow-running minnow-imitators are ideal for covering expansive shallow flats, day or night.
Boards also don’t all have to be placed on the same side of the boat. Walleye pros sometimes stack the lineup, much like placing all your wide receivers on one side to confuse and overwhelm the defense. In essence, you run three or even four planer boards off one side of the boat, with the farthest-out board right up along shore or along the edges of cover.
In spring, with walleyes frequently running shallow shorelines, stacking boards saturates the fish zone without running the boat right over the area and spooking fish. About the only real adjustment you need for this technique is to add a few more rod holders on either gunwale, preferably with taller holders in the front of the boat for extra separation.
When trolling open water, you can do much the same thing. Why would you want to? When trolling in a strong crosswind, the spread of boards on the upwind side of the boat tends to collapse. Those on the downwind side spread farther apart. It makes sense to place three boards on the downwind side and one upwind to prevent potential tangles and make trolling easier.
Getting Control
Speed control was mentioned briefly, but it warrants another look. Over the years, anglers have dragged buckets and drift socks, opened or closed the windshield of a walk-through console, and run big motors in reverse to better control their speeds.
However, electric trolling motors have increasingly come into play in the tournament game for slow-trolling planer boards in open water, similar to the way you’d use them to troll across shallow flats. Most trolling motors have more than enough thrust. They also provide better directional control than kicker motors, steering from the bow rather than the stern.
A motor with a long cord or remote steering pedal, such as the Minn Kota PowerDrive V2 series, facilitates this strategy. Sit in back, tap your toe and steer. Or use the hand-held CoPilot option to change directions with the punch of a button.
For a bit more advanced application, the AutoPilot features on some trolling motors come into play. These allow you to set a compass course and let the motor correct itself along a compass heading, perhaps with your kicker motor simultaneously running to provide additional thrust.
The latest rage is the Minn Kota i-Pilot system for the V2 and Terrova. The i-Pilot allows you to steer, change speeds and plot courses by either GPS points or compass bearing simply by pressing a few buttons. You can even plot trolling tracks and then repeat them back and forth automatically, while the motor does the steering and you attend lines.
The other thing you’ll see mounted on the motors of many FLW Outdoors walleye pros is a single or dual electric motor mounted on the cavitation plate. With the Minn Kota Engine Mount series you get variable speed adjustment using a hand-held or console-mounted control. You can steer the boat by maneuvering the outboard, turning with either console or tiller steering. This allows you to fine-tune trolling speeds for many applications, not the least of which is trolling in open water with planer boards.
Whichever systems you use, the basic idea is to slow down to a productive trolling speed and make boat control as easy and effective as possible. You already have your hands full locating fish, tending lines, changing lures, watching boards and netting walleyes. Let your equipment do most of the work for you.
Final Thoughts from a Pioneer
While walleye anglers tend to associate planer-board trolling with big lakes, Gehrman has caught walleyes using boards on all sizes of waters just about everywhere he has been. In his mind, most small lakes are totally, unbelievably untapped. Give him four hours of trolling on a natural lake with a modest amount of basin and he will catch something. The fish simply haven’t seen lures presented in that fashion. And if he doesn’t catch anything, the fish simply aren’t biting.
However, it’s not just where that makes planer boards effective; it’s everything that they can tell an angler.
“In the process of watching planer boards over the years, I’ve detected subtle clues to fish migrations and holding areas on many bodies of water,” Gehrman says. “I’ve discovered sections of big bays with slightly deeper slots running through them, offshore patches of harder bottom with barely any indication of a change in depth and how certain wind directions set up current flows that direct fish on somewhat predictable movements. It’s a far more fascinating and complex subject than simply going out, tossing your lures and boards overboard, towing them around, and waiting for your reel to scream.”
That’s how it’s done – then and now. Use boards as bobbers, fish slowly, and observe and react as you go.
