Thread: Question: How does one know how deep their cranks are running?

Originally Posted by JustinM1

how do you guys have them rigged with 2 Oz of weight? just a slip sinker down to a swivel then a lead back to your crank?

Justin .... some do use "trolling weights" and some of those have swivels built-in. Others do use barrel or other slip type sinkers, and do have a swivel or clip on the end of the main line to attach your leader.

Some of our members make "trolling weights w/swivel" ... & some of my crankin buddies have purchased trolling weights (torpedo shape with ring eye on each end) from Crawdads ( Trolling Sinker Weights )

Now that you've heard all the technical side of things, I'll pipe up from the cheap seats. Over time, and especially with this, time on the water is the best teacher, you'll find some things will stick out to you. If you know your waters and you troll, set up 2 or 3 rods with the same bait, be it jig or crank or minnow. First rod is a short cast, second is a long cast, and the third is in between. On days when they're finicky , one of these rods will get more than the others. With a sharpie, mark the line at the reel. let the short line out and bring the long line in to be very close to the marked line and run those for a while. Then the colors will show which suits their mood for the day. Sometimes the clown colors are hot, others the natural presentations will shine above the others. Pay attention to the cloud cover and which colors are doing best.

The electronics make this so much simpler. I left mine home one day and still had a super day. They don't have to be in the boat. The sharpie mark will rub off so be sure to keep it fresh. The weight on the line makes the lines shorter and turning around much simpler and faster. Summer of '15 a friend and I were pushing 4 and pulling 4 or 6 and busy. One day the pushers would do all the work and the next day not a thing. As you have already seen from the many responses so far, there is a bunch of info on this, and it can be as simple or detailed as you care to make it. Somewhere along the way you'll find the way that you like best. In the end, I ran 6 rods of various length and my most important tool was the tracking feature on my GPS. As the sun rose they sometimes moved into deeper water and the game continued. The GPS helped me to track parallel and a bit deeper of my former track.

Good luck on working this all out, the learning process is fun and you'll be in good company. Keep us posted and show some pics now and then. If I haven't already said it, Welcome from Central Florida.

Wow, three pages and no one mentioned the easiest method of all??? Mark Rominack from Michigan has helped to create what was known as the trollers bible. Originally it was in book format called Precision trolling. You can still get the stick on cards but now you download the FREE precision trolling ap. You can purchase the dive chart for each bait for 1.99 or the whole set for less than 100 bucks. Has about every crank known to man.

Yoy can tell it how many feet down you want to run with braid or mono and it will tell you how many feet back. Or, if you are catching fish at 20 back, you can plug that in and it gives the depth. Most important thing with this system is to have properly calibrated reels. I troll most of the time and would't think of doing it any other way.

This isn't guess work. No math and probabilities that a bait "should" run a certain depth basedon line angle. It is tested with divers in the water visually watching and measuring dive deprh based on line out vs speed of the boat. Hundreds of thousands of hours in the water testing.

Dear John,

What you should have learned by now is that my original answer is fact.