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Fished Strawberry today with my cousin. We first started off fishing with fresh red shiner minnows. The trout weren't interested but we caught about a 10 inch chub on a minnow! I had never seen that before. We tried bait fishing next to all of the other boats in Indian Creek Bay for a short time, and I would have landed one fish had I tied a good knot. We then bagged that and went trolling. Trolling was slow until we found them about a mile and half out from Strawberry Marina. Had it not been for my GPS I don't think we would have caught nearly as many. With it we were able to troll through the same area and keep catching fish. My other first was catching several fish on a separate leader that I slid down my line on the downrigger. I set the downrigger at 40 feet, deeper than I have ever run it at Strawberry, then I snapped on a second leader, approximately 20" long, onto my line and it would go down to about 20'. I was catching them on both lures. I caught my fish on frog flatfish, crawlers for a short time, and minnows. My cousin caught his on a Carter Spoon and a crawler behind a dodger. He was using leaded line and would go out anywhere from four to six colors. The wind didn't even blow up there today, and we only got sprinkled on. It would have been a perfect day had my trolling motor not quit on us.
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Kent, I've never heard of catching a chub on a minnow. Did you save it and use it for bait? Any size to the cutts?
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Sounds like a good day at the Berry and that downrigger trick sounds interesting. How did you learn to use a separate leader to put a second line one downrigger? Do you need any special equipment to have more than one line on a downrigger? WH2
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[font "Comic Sans MS"][black][size 3]Stacker releases or rubberbands work great for stacking riggers with several lines each. It's nothing to put three separate lines out per rigger, in fact, it's a very common practice.[/size][/black][/font]
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No need to save the chub that we caught with the red shiner we had plenty of minnows (caught plenty of red shiners that were just the right size) that we had caught with the casting net earlier.
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CLARIFICATION - I did not have a second line on my downrigger (that would have been illegal, because my cousin was already fishing with leaded line, and we would have had three rods in the water). I had a second line off of my fishing line that was already attached to the downrigger. I learned about it by watching Doug Miller the other evening, and he had a guy on there fishing for kokanee at The Gorge. I just used a snap, attached to a swivel, and attached to the swivel was about 15 to 20 inches of leader which was attached to a lure or a minnow. I attached my rod to the downrigger and sent it to the bottom, then I tightened the line a little and pulled my rod close enough to the boat that I could lean out and reach the fishing line. I then connected the snap to the fishing line and released the lure/minnow behind the fishing line, and it would go down to the depth where the line is bowed the most, which will be 1/2 way down to where your line is attached to the downrigger. So with the downrigger set at 40 feet the line clipped to my fishing line would be at 20'. Realize that this second line will be running only a couple feet (or in my case, with the downrigger attached about four feet from the stearn of the boat, probably about even with the stearn) behind the boat at best. Interestingly, I caught about 50% of my fish on the second line.
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