We’ll just state the obvious. Fishing for walleye is just plain fun. Thrilling and fast-paced, catching walleye means an angler has to be quick-thinking when it comes to fishing this predator. That’s why we asked walleye expert, Dale Gilbert, to share his extensive walleye knowledge with us. A walleye master, Dale, has fished walleye from Arkansas to Canada and Michigan to Montana, and he doesn’t disappoint.

When you get a fish on, you have to reel the board in, put the board down, and reel in your crankbait and your fish. In this link, walleye expert, Dale Gilbert, explains his setup for trolling with planer boards and a technique that he uses to make sure lures are tuned.

Video Transcription

How to Troll with Planer Boards

Hey folks, this is Dale Gilbert. We're gonna talk about getting set up here and do a little bit of trolling with some planer boards with crankbaits for walleye. First thing, you just need a rod and reel setup. This is actually one of my favorite rods, it's actually a St. Croix Wild River series, kind of a medium power, moderate fast action is what I really like. Then I use this Berkley Abu Garcia 5500LC line counters spooled up with about some ten pound Berkley FireLine Tracer. You kind of see it's kind of a high vis/low vis line, every five feet it actually changes color so it's a little bit low vis and then a little bit high vis so I can still kind of see my line. Typically I'll start with just a cross lock snap like this, just tied so I can make changes in my crankbaits to experiment a little bit with colors and the sizes until I get things figured out.

I'll start out with this and this right here, a little Berkley Flicker Shad, one of my favorite crankbaits actually. Go ahead and stick it on the cross lock snap, put her on there, and I got it all set up here. I got it ready to go. Now usually when I'm fishing crankbaits, the first thing I wanna do is put the crankbait in the water and kind of at trolling speed, kind of troll it along and then give it a good pull and make sure it's tuned. So when I put this in the water here, it's gonna be vibrating and trolling and what I'll do is I'll give it a real big pull. As long as it dives straight down into the water it's tuned, if it's not tuned and it comes skidding out on one side or the other, it's out of tuning and it needs a little adjusting with that. So like if I put it down in the water and it kind of came out to the right and I want it to go back to the left, what I do is I take the little needle nose pliers and if I want it to go back to the other direction, I put this on the little metal thing in the middle of that plastic bead and I'll squeeze right here. You don't want to see it move but you just wanna put a little pressure on it, put it back in, check it again. 'Cause if you overdo it, it's pretty easy to make it go too far the other way.

Once I got that set out, now with crankbaits and planer boards, or crankbaits period-- longline trolling for crankbaits, it pays to look at Precision Trolling Bible which is actually a company that manufactured a book, now it's an online app, where you can actually figure out like with this crankbait, if I wanna run this crankbait, this number seven Hooker Shad like in 12 foot of water, I can look at that dive curve chart and tell me that probably at 75 foot of line you're gonna make this crankbait run in about that depth of water 'cause that's kind of the clue. What you need to do is decide what you're gonna fish so these things run where you want 'em to run. Bottom line then, all you do is you let out enough line. So let's say that I put out 80 foot of line on my line counter and once I get that crank bait out to where I want it to be, so I know it's gonna run the depth that I'm planning on fishing.

The next thing I'll do is I grab my planer boards. Planer boards are like this, they make a right hand, they make a left hand planer board. This is actually an offshore board with a paddle flag on it. It's a pretty neat system 'cause when you get hooked up and if you get too much of a pull or lead sometimes you can tell somethings wrong. With a planer board they've got a little spring loaded deal here and these clips for your line. Bottom line, all of my planer boards, the first thing I do is I replace these little red clips that are standard on the offshore planer boards and I'll put this offshore snapper release on here because you'll see the little pin on this. What I do then, this is a right planer board so this is gonna go off on the right side of the boat. Take the bait away from the boat a little bit and you can let it out 20 foot, 30 foot, 40 foot, however you wanna go. Bottom line what you do is you just take your line, you put it in with that snapper release and then you rotate this thing forward and you'll see what happens is this little pin that's here will go down and lock in there so it's impossible for this board to come off that line. That's one of the reasons I really like this.

Then I'll take a little bit of slack between my offshore snapper release and my other one here and hook it up with the little pin steel. So now my crankbait's back there and it's pulling, but now if it gets to pulling too much you can see the paddle flag is actually gonna move. So when the crank baits out there doing it's thing I got a little slack line so it's not pulling but then when something pulls a little harder than it should on that, my paddle flag will actually work. Then you just basically have to learn to watch your board, watch your flag. You see the board start to drag back a little bit, there's probably a small fish on it or it could be a weed. You get a big fish on it, they sometimes will actually just sink that board like a big bobber. It's pretty exciting when you see that happen.

A great way to spread your presentations out and cover a little more water, get things especially in shallow water. When you get a fish on, you have to reel the board in and then you have to take this release off. This ones really tight 'cause it hasn't been in the water yet. But you have to pop that off to get this off, still keeping the line tight. Then put the board down and reel in your crank bait and your fishy. That's the way it works.

Thanks for watching. If you have any further questions on walleye fishing, please come visit us at any of our retail locations or North40.com.