Deep Dropperloop Fishing

[ratdog]

Nice informative video, Thanks for sharing

[the dude]

nice!

[LEEZO]

thank you sir. always dig the videos, they never get old. cheers

[Salty]

Been up North camping and fishing in the cold water off the Lost Coast! I'm not much into rockfishing, but needed to try something new and get away and it was a ton of fun. Still, after watching this, I'm looking forward to getting back on the "warmer" waters of LJ very soon... So thanks for the motivation! Great video btw!

[ProfessorLongArms]

Just got to this one in my watch queue. Way to make it look easy!

Here's a question-

I follow you and Nakada to the letter when I'm targeting (mostly) WSB and (less so since I'm further north) YT....
I've noted there's a lot of watching for marks and dropping on them, be it either a bait ball or a mark that actually looks like a big fish.

How often would you say you end up *seeing* those marks on a given trip?
Bait balls I see all the time, but I feel like I'll go a number of trips without seeing big slugs in my meter.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being more attentive to the depth finder?

Or would you say finding those marks can be a bit of a longer waiting game?

[Gflann]

Good question ^^^ Interested in Chris and other’s take on this.

[JohnMckroidJr]

Originally Posted by Gflann

Good question ^^^ Interested in Chris and other’s take on this.

I am on the east coast, but I meter big fish every time I go fishing -- wish I could coax more into bitting. This was last weekend. The school of fish swam down to check out the upward retrieval of my jig, then when I realized the event, I free spooled at about 50ft, and then again you can see the game fish checking my jig out again on the sink at about 150ft down.

[chris138]

Originally Posted by ProfessorLongArms

Just got to this one in my watch queue. Way to make it look easy!

Here's a question-

I follow you and Nakada to the letter when I'm targeting (mostly) WSB and (less so since I'm further north) YT....
I've noted there's a lot of watching for marks and dropping on them, be it either a bait ball or a mark that actually looks like a big fish.

How often would you say you end up *seeing* those marks on a given trip?
Bait balls I see all the time, but I feel like I'll go a number of trips without seeing big slugs in my meter.
Sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of being more attentive to the depth finder?

Or would you say finding those marks can be a bit of a longer waiting game?

Good question. I hope to go into more detail about this in a future video. The first point is, being able to be sure about what is actually a good mark/marks. There are so many aspects to this. Obviously you need to be on the right frequency and have the settings dialed in pretty well. We've covered that in some other videos and threads, and it can vary between units, but generally speaking you are on the lowest frequency you have and you have the gain/sensitivity turned up enough that the bottom marks very hard on the "hottest" color in you palate. The biggest indicators of a fish are:

1. Thick and solid mark with definitive boarders, with the thickness being relative to the depth scale you are in. In 20 feet of water a big greenback looks like a yellowtail in 100', and in 180' of water a yellowtail looks like a greenback in 50'. The screen only has so many pixels, and the scale of the mark is relative to the depth and resolution of the display.

2. Fast moving fish look like "arches" slower moving fish look like "worms". But they will rarely mark as a straight boomerang, unless the fish is way out on the perimeter of the cone. The boomerang shape is caused by the doppler effect. So keeping that in mind you can apply that to the behavior of predatory game fish. These fish are very seldom sitting still. So, as you are bobbing up and down in the swell, your depth is constantly changing by a few feet which results in the "waviness" of the bottom on your screen. If the worm you are looking at follows the bottom contour, that means it is sitting stationary relative to the bottom, that means it is pretty much just hovering in place and a gamefish will rarely do this. The right kind of marks change in depth independently of the bottom contour wave action.

3. Fish in a school will usually change depths independently of each other. So instead of a bunch of parallel worms stacked on top of each other neatly, a school of fish will look all tangled like spaghetti. A big school will rarely look like parallel stacked marks, especially if they are also parallel with the bottom.

[chris138]

So given all that, I probably see at least a good mark or two on every trip. That doesn't mean it was for sure the right kind though. Could be that it was a shark, or a ray, or some gnarly cormorant hunting at depth. Seeing a single or a pair of good marks is fairly common. I'll always drop on them but a single usually wont result in a hookup. A huge indicator of the right kind is if they react to your bait. Whether its the yoyo or the dropper loop, gamefish will almost always come check out your bait. Most of the time they wont bite it, but they will react to it.

Seeing a school of the right kind is a different story. I probably only see schools like 1/3 or 1/4 of the trips. Your chances of getting hooked up on a school are higher, because as they have more of a reaction component to the bite. Once you have multiple fish checking out your bait, they have the instinct to compete with each other and will be more aggressive typically... unless they are in a spawning behavior.

So to answer your questions, yes I see good mark on pretty much every trip... but much less frequently I see the REALLY good marks of a school where I'm 100% sure of what I'm looking at.