550′ 60lb Copper on a Penn Senator 15L
The dog days of June are upon us, and staring back at our spread waiting for something exciting to happen is the word! Lots of playing around with new 60lb copper™ setups, new lines being tested for 2014 and working with different planer boards and divers. Our heads are pretty scrambled personally on integrating the new 60lb copper™ setups into our existing programs. We have had a few standby copper segments in 32lb and particularly 45lb that have been not-so-standby over the past few seasons and they have been begging to be replaced by some new 60lb.
Being at the top of the copper game, Blood Run pro staff spend a ton of time pulling a ton of copper around, and it is fairly easy to state based upon their observations, that not every copper segment works just because it is swimming at a particular depth. We hear it all the time..”I can’t get my 250 to go, but everyone else does” and similar.
The big thing to remember is your speed is never going to be the same as someone else’s. Just because your buddy can’t keep his 250 in the water doesn’t mean you can’t try and duplicate its success with a 300′ …at a higher speed. But like anything in the trolling game, you have to be committed to a program and by and large stick with it. If you spend the time to dial in all of your coppers and wire divers, they should ALWAYS be productive whenever there are fish around. You might have to tweak a bait or two, but even that is a stretch.
Certain lures work better on certain copper segments at certain speeds…this is undeniable fact. We aren’t going to spend alot of time rolling down our list, as everyone who fishes copper enough knows what we are talking about here. But spend the time and dial it in, and glue the swivel shut once you figure out the baits that work best at your speed on your different copper setups. That’s right, you should always put the same lure on the same copper segment and walk away from it. Don’t ever change it. Some days it will go, some days it might not. But if you can establish a pattern of success with a certain bait in a variety of conditions, then you have a winner. We personally live by this philosophy and it has never ever failed us. Even on opposite sides of the lake, fishing different ports, in different times of the season.
Personally we troll pretty fast, so the 60lb is appealing to us because it will allow us to fish deeper than we previously could, at our preferred higher speeds. We have to now go through the process of figuring out what segments are the best, with what lures. We also need to figure out what other setups of 45lb and 32lb are going to be mothballed because of lack of production. The next couple of months will be interesting and exciting no doubt!
With that said, we have good action going now on our 550′ 60lb copper™ setup. We tried the Solterra 50L from Okuma and it worked well, but we found after significant testing that the Penn Senator 15L conventional reel is a much better setup. Price more effectively, and extremely smooth on the payout and retrieve…it was hard to resist. How could you resist it? It is the same reel that Jaws was caught on in the movie….click, click, click!
The next challenge was to find the right planer board to pull this beast around. Obviously this super deep rig is going to have a flasher on it, in our case a Dreamweaver Spin Doctor, so the extra drag would be a concern.
Lately we have been playing around with some of the original Ziggy Boards from Sheboygan (green ones…not the orange ones called Z board) and have been super impressed…even on our short coppers. We have always been fans of the Church Walleye and Offshore SST boards on our short coppers, but both could not compare to the Ziggy. The Walleye boards have been the worst performers, particularly with flashers and any kind of current or wave action. We never knew how far back they would drag until we ran a Ziggy board next to them. WOW! The Ziggy’s run far up, where we like them, instead of far back…over our wire divers.
So we put the 550′ 60lb copper™ out with a 10″ Spin Doctor, and ran it inside of a 250′ 45lb copper with a 8″ paddle, and to the furthest outside a 150′ 32lb copper with a spoon. The picture says it all! The Ziggy board pulled the massive 60lb rig with a 10″ Spin Doctor up as far and inline with the 32lb spoon on a Walleye board. Pictured waaaay back was the 250′ 45lb copper on the Walleye board with an 8″ paddle style flasher.
These are very impressive results! The Ziggy Boards are hard to find, we are trying to get some more ourselves. But having proved themselves several times this year in very rough seas, and long heavy coppers…they are quickly winning over our favor.
We did run another test with a 300′ 60lb copper™ with a Spin Doctor behind a Church TX-44…and as expected it ran right up inline with the Ziggy. The TX-44 is an awesome board as well, the only drawback has been a tendency to dive when a fish hits on occasion…we don’t know why because it happens randomly. But in any case, it does do the trick with the 60lb copper™ and is slightly larger in size than the Ziggy board.
Stay tuned for more testing, feedback and analyses on our new setups as we get into king season!
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