I took some friends to Bomb Island yesterday evening so that they could see the purple martins come in for the night and on the way, I saw a center console trolling with outriggers deployed. May have been a Key West with twins. If the people on the boat read this, please give a report on what you were pulling from the outriggers and if you had any success. You were on the edge of the river channel near Timberlake when I saw you.
I have outriggers as well and have been tempted to experiment with them at Lake Murray, just never have. Mine do not telescope, so I don’t run with them unless I plan on fishing with them.
WD, I’ve seen the same thing in the past. (not this year) Figure they are using the outriggers with freelined herring instead of planers. Should work. Have been doing decent with live herring in 20-50 ft earlier in the year. Last time out (2 weeks ago) I didn’t change my pattern until late in the day and found 30" plus fish in 50’ of water along the river channel. Hope to get back out there soon. Good luck.
Whaler, you and I had talked about pulling umbrella rigs with the outtiggers and I discussed it with one of my fishing buddies over the weekend. He writes articles for the NSBA magazine and has fished/done articles on Steve Fraylish who lives and dies with the umbrella rigs. Steve told him the last thing you want is for the umbrella to drop with a fish on since it will usally spit the hook in that case. We figured that would be the problem with the outriggers is that when they hit the rig and pull from the clip you will get that drop back and for that reason they probably would not work.
We did think about the idea of pulling the umbrellas of the rear(flat line style) and running our leadcore setups on the outriggers. Everytime I try and pull umbrella rigs and leadcore before it is over I end up with a tangled mess.
I may give this a try next time out and just see how it works. My only problem is that my outriggers are not telescopic and I have to remove/install them everytime I go under a bridge but as long as I am on the big water of Hartwell they will not be a problem. I am just dying to set these things out on the lake and see the look on everyones faces:sunglasses:
tprice, sounds like others have the same concerns we have about pulling u-rigs with outriggers. With my current set-up, I can pull four u-rigs without outriggers and without problems, so I guess that is what I will stick with for right now. Besides, it’s downrigger season for me now. If I could just finish a couple home projects so that I could go…
Whaler, I am in the same “boat” as you. Wife is on my rear to do a few things around the house this weekend so I guess I should take care of that while it is so hot and before you know it deer season will be here.
guys when i lived on lake murry i would pull umbrella rigs from my outriggers on a 21 cc you have to tighten the clips up but it works good ,i would pull one from each rigger on the top and one from each downriggger deeper this worked good when the fish would not bite live or cut bait.
chris what do you know about bubblers?you need to get your ass down here we have caught some big reds the last couple of weeks.
OK sailfish, I may try it anyway. My outriggers are double rigged, so I believe I may be ok using the shortest rigging…not as much potential for slack after a hit. Thanks for the info.
