Over the years, countless prospective clients have asked if I planned to troll during their guided trips. I can usually tell by the tone of the conversation that tactical musky strategy isn’t what they’re thinking about. They’re wondering if the trip will be boring. I’ve also overheard fellow guides and anglers discuss trolling with such unbridled disdain you’d think musky trolling stole their wife and killed their dog. Extreme takes, sure, but they line up with how a lot of musky anglers feel about trolling. I can’t point to one single factor that gave trolling a bad rap, but the knee-jerk reaction most anglers have to it is abysmal. If I had to guess, that opinion is more connected to a lack of success than most people would care to admit.
Most anglers fail at trolling because they treat it like an afterthought. They resort to it when casting gets difficult due to weather, when they’re tired, or as a last-ditch effort. The “tactical” version of that last-ditch trolling usually looks like this: haphazardly throwing baits behind the boat at an arbitrary distance, then driving around like zombies in hopes of a Hail Mary musky.
If that’s been your trolling experience, I understand why you hate it. But I can also assure you I’ve never had a client complain about being bored after a couple forty-inchers hit the net. Read the rest, click here