Increase the effectiveness of divers for walleye by blackening shiny or bright colored ones often used for salmon.
Walleyes will bite spoons, stickbaits, cranks and even spinners towed deep with Dipsy Divers.
In 1991 the Professional Walleye Trail was only a couple of years old and that year the first tourney was slated to be held on Lake Erie at Put-In-Bay, Ohio. I’d been making Put-In-Bay my Lake Erie fishing headquarters for several years, so it was an easy, “Hell, yes!” when I was invited to cover the tournament by the PWT organizers.
The tournament contenders were allowed to come a few days early to “pre-fish” and dial-in the places and tactics they’d use when the starting bell rang the first day of the competition. Media attendees were invited to come a few days early as well, and they’d be allowed to fish with the tournament entrants on the pre-fishing days. The first pre-fishing day I was put on the boat with Jim Fofrich, Sr., one of the most experienced charter captains on Lake Erie and one of the first to embrace trolling as a tactic to put walleyes on the lines of his customers.
At the time, I had an 18-foot aluminum boat, rigged up and used for salmon trolling on Lake Michigan most of the time, but I trailered it over to Lake Erie a couple times each year. At the time, Ohio regs allowed only two rods per person so even when I had a full crew of four on my boat we were limited to eight rods. We ran six lines using planer boards and added number seven and eight as downrigged lines. Experience had taught us that downriggers caught their share of the fish if they were checked regularly for “draggers”—walleyes that didn’t trip the releases. Experience also taught us fishing with Dipsy Divers was basically a waste of time. Even on trips when my young son came along so we could run 10 lines, the Dipsys didn’t add appreciably to our catch.
Adjust the diver’s bail release screw as needed depending on wave conditions.
So when I was fishing with Fofrich I was surprised that after setting all of his side planers, the next rigs he readied were Dipsy Diver sets. As much as for adding to my own knowledge as for the story I’d write about the tournament I asked, “Do you catch much on the Dipsys?”
“Oh yeah!” he said emphatically. “Some days you can’t keep the divers in the water.”
I was skeptical. I also noted both of the divers he was using were painted flat black. So I asked, “Why did you paint the divers black?”.
The captain said, “I got tired of the fish biting the diver, not the lure trailing behind it.”
I didn’t say it but I thought, “Why not just put a hook on the diver?”
I remained a skeptic about divers for walleyes. At the end of the day of fishing with Fofrich we’d caught plenty of walleyes but none of them were conned by a lure pulled under by one of the divers.
DOES DIVER COLOR MATTER?
I asked Capt. Bob Potishman that question once and I agree with what he told me. Capt. Bob is the owner of the Confusion Charters fleet operating out of Chicago and Winthrop Harbor, IL. His answer, “Sure diver colors matter. Everything matters and you’ll go nuts if you try to juggle all the variables all the time. So you have to prioritize. It probably matters if you are using 20- or 25-pound line some days. Everyone knows using the right lure or the right lure color matters. Does it matter if your snap swivel is silver or black? It probably does some days. So does bumping your trolling speed a few tenths.”
“So diver colors probably does matter some days,” he concluded. “But it’s certainly not one of the variables I worry about first, second or even third.” When I use divers for salmon or trout, I’ve never worried much about the color other than I normally bought bright, chrome or fluorescent colors. I actually think the divers are an attractor for those species. They spot the bright chartreuse, orange or the flash off the chrome divers I’m pulling and come over to investigate. I don’t think they bite the divers, but they often bite the lures trailing a few feet behind them.
MOVE OR REMOVE
When I have a boat full of fisherman, I usually set 12 rods, mixing downriggers, planers and diver sets, more often than not, just one diver per side. Mathematically, if the diver sets only caught their share of the fish, one of every six bites would come on the diver rigs.
I don’t keep those records, but I’d guess about one-third of the time the divers produce as well as the other lines, another third of the time they out produce all the other sets, some days catching half or more of the fish. The other third of the time they don’t perform up to standard. Regardless, it’s a rare day they don’t at least catch a few fish.
Black-colored, Size 1 Dipsy Divers are not available. Black spray paint is.
BACK TO ERIE
A few years ago Ohio upped the rod limit from two-per-person to three-per. That meant when a few friends and I fished in the Ohio part of the lake, we could legally add three or four more rigs; so we did, and two of those were often Dipsy Diver sets. Again, I was skeptical of them producing on a reliable basis.
Of course, when I went to Lake Erie I just pulled out the same bright colored divers I used on Lake Michigan the week before. Perhaps if we’d hooked a few walleyes on that PWT pre-fishing day using those black divers I’d have spray painted a couple of mine.
I didn’t and my success using divers remained substandard. Since we were using the divers full time, instead of just giving one or two of them an hour or so as a test, we did catch a few fish using them, but they never produced more than a few fish each day. Mathematically, with a 12-rod spread which included a diver on each side, each diver should have accounted for one of every six fish, right? Their performance always fell short.
MORE LESSONS
For more than 20 years Mr. Walleye 101, Lance Valentine (www.teachinfishin.com), has been hosting a Teachin’ Fishin’ Weekend (actually four days) at Huron, Ohio the first weekend in November. It combines hands on fishing experience with formal and informal sessions to learn about walleye fishing—at Huron specifically, but also other places on the Great Lakes and elsewhere.
Lance calls in walleye pros, charter captains and others to give Teachin’ Fishin’ sessions before and after the fishing sessions. One of the presenters is Ali Shakoor, an adjunct professor at Wayne State University, walleye charter captain and tournament angler who approaches walleye fishing from a science-based point of view. In a conversation with Ali at a TF weekend a few years ago he mentioned he painted all his Dipsy Divers flat black. I instantly flashed back a few decades to Jim Fofrich’s black divers.
I asked him to explain why? “I want the fish to be paying attention to the lure, not to the diver,” he said.
I was still a skeptic, but I’ll try most anything once. The next spring, before my first trip to Erie, I grabbed a couple of my older, faded and scratched Dipseys and spray painted them flat black—top and bottom. “It can’t hurt,” I thought.
My Lake Erie crew thinks we’ve broken the code for diver fishing for walleyes.
I went a skeptic, I came home a believer—or at least an optimist! On that first “black diver trip” the divers caught their share and more of the walleyes we hoisted into the boat for my friends and me.
Our trolling spread consisted of six planer board lines, four downrigged lines and two rods pulling Dipsy Divers. Mathematically, if every presentation performed equally, we’d have caught half of our 24 fish limit on the planer boards, eight on downriggers and four on the divers. Of course, that’s unlikely because other factors are at play—lure type, lure depth, color and others; but remember, on previous trips, using bright colored divers, the divers never performed close to standard.
On that first trip using the black divers they performed above standard, pulling a variety of lures and in conditions that varied from flat calm to four footers. The first day of the trip they caught five (of 24)—above the statistical average and that turned out to be their poorest performance of the trip. On each of the other days the two divers picked off seven or eight of the keepers in the box. I didn’t switch any of the black divers to a bright color to see if that was the key. I wasn’t there to run equipment tests, we were on a fishing trip.
On subsequent trips, we did spend more time experimenting with our divers, including giving bright colored “salmon” divers a try a few times. We kept going back to the “black beauties.” Those weren’t the only experiments we tried.
LURE CHOICE
Normally, other than when I peg flashers and flies behind my salmon divers, I use either spoons or shallow diving hard baits with them. The divers are just a mechanism to get the lures down to the correct depths. For walleyes, it’s the same and I paired my divers with shallow diving stickbaits or walleye spoons—most of the time.
On one of our “black diver” trips to Erie, our “shad shaped” crankbaits like Flicker Shads and ShadRaps were by far superior to the elongated deep diving lures such as Bandits and Rumble Sticks. So even though a Flicker Shad would dive a couple feet deeper than the Dipsy on a five- or six-foot leader, that’s what we used. They worked just fine.
A medium-sized linecounter reel spooled with 30-pound braid is perfect for “divering” for walleyes.
The fishing reports we read in advance of another of our Erie trips suggested worm harnesses were doing much of the work, apparently because of dirtier than normal water. We picked up a box of Walt’s Crawlers on the way to the lake and outfitted a couple of our downrigged lines as well as a diver with spinner/crawler rigs. Fish on—even at crankbait trolling speeds.
RIGGING FOR DIVERS
Dipsy Divers come in a variety of sizes and most sizes have detachable rings to appreciatively change their dive curves. For 90 percent of my salmon and trout trolling I rely on the size Luhr Jensen calls 001, with or without the add-on ring. That’s the size I painted black and use on Lake Erie. At the time of year we go, the 001 will easily reach the 15 to 30 foot depths where we normally find the active fish.
The first Dipsy Divers made in the 1980s were 001 size and I’ve been using them since they were first available. I’ve tried the other sizes and except when trying to get lures really deep with the Magnum, 003 size. I’ve found the two smaller sizes—(Mini Dipsy and Size 0) problematic when using salmon (or walleye)-sized crankbaits.
For salmon trolling, I use medium-heavy to heavy, nine- or ten-foot diver rods. These have the backbone to hold up to the weight and pull of the diver at salmon and steelhead speeds and still provide a cushion to the line and leader when a salmon or steelhead strikes. On Lake Erie, my favorite model is an inexpensive 9” Berkley Lightning trolling rod. (www.berkley-fishing.com). Though light in weight, these will pull 001 divers just fine at speeds in the middle two MPH range and the cushiony tips usually allow detecting the mild strike of a walleye when trolling with braided line.
Detecting strikes when a walleye latches onto a lure behind a diver will always be an issue. The relatively light tip of the downrigger rod helps but not as much as using a no-stretch braid as the main line. Monofilament has too much stretch. I use 30-pound braid for both salmon and walleyes.
For salmon, when using braid, I always equip my divers with a shock absorbing snubber between the disk and the lure. For walleye, I forgo the snubber and use about five feet of 12-pound fluorocarbon line for the leader. Fluoro has a bit less stretch and I like the invisibility factor. A big walleye (or even a big sheephead) won’t hit hard enough to over-test the tensile strength of the leader, but between the no-stretch braid and the limited-stretch fluoro, most of the bites register in the rod tip when the fish hits the lure. Some of the fish will trip the diver if its adjustment screw is loosely set.
Blacked out divers will catch salmon and may be better on tough fishing days.
If trolling in waves large enough to make your boat surge in speed on the troll or rock significantly when going sideways to the waves, forget trying to adjust the releases on the divers to snap free on a strike. In calm conditions, loosen the release if you wish, but it still isn’t perfect. I’ve had 15-inchers pop the divers and 25-inchers that didn’t. We’ve learned to check our diver sets every 15 minutes or so. I’d rather have to reset an empty diver every quarter hour a few times than to pull one in after an hour or more to find a “dragger” on it which has been there for who knows how long.
DOWN OR OUT
The “dipsy” part of the DD is more important than the “diver” part. Center the adjustable weight on the underside of the DD on the zero setting and the devise will dive straight behind the boat just as though a heavy sinker was tied on the line. Rotate the weight to the three setting and the diver will plane away from the boat almost as much as it will penetrate the depths. Use the in between settings to adjust the down or out. Since I integrate a pair of divers into a spread that includes downriggers, I adjust the weight, left or right, to the three setting—maximizing the diver’s “dipsy” function.
More and more walleye trollers are incorporating four or even six divers into their trolling spread especially if their boat isn’t equipped with downriggers. (A diver set on zero would constantly tangle with downrigger lines.) With no ‘riggers, however, try a pair of divers sets on each side of the boat. Set one of each pair on zero or one and another set on three to double the diver fun.
BLACK MAGIC
So is the simple chore of painting a Dipsy Diver black enough to release it’s magic; to turn it from a “why not” tactic to a “sure thing?” I don’t know if it’s magic, but I do know without any other changes, my diver sets went from being the first tactic I’d abandon, to a tactic I’m reluctant to go without.
Trolling with Dipsy Divers will put more walleye in your catch most days.
Was it really the black paint job? I think so. Now I’m wondering about those days on Lake Michigan when my divers are not as productive as usual, would switching them to black help? I’m going to find out.
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