My wife and I where fishing Lake Coleman for Hybrids. We got into a pack of small fish that were 16". No keepers!!!! Another boat was trolling the area and catching bigger fish.

Here is the question. What baits do you guys use for trolling?

What baits were you using and how big/small are the lures?

1. Could be they were fishing a little deeper than you. Bigger fish like to lay under the smaller more active fish and slurp up the wounded bait that fall to the bottom.
2. Could be they were trolling faster or sloer than you.
3. Could be they were in a different school of fish.

Bigger lures will help keep the smaller fish off. 3 mph is about the slowest I will troll.

We were fishing live bait. When they schooled up the shad and were on top water we threw spoons and hair jigs.

What bait would you troll with?

Were it me, I would use a deep diving crank in shad pattern
with a 1/2 oz lead head about 18 inches ahead of it with a
4 inch plastic shad or curley tail grub on the jig head. This
will get down below the shallow smaller fish.

I would use slabs in the back of coleman at the big rise were the trees start Or any 12' crank bait.

I use almost only slabs. A friend of mine who does very well trolling uses a three way swivel. 18 inches of fishing line to a stripper jig and 3 feet of line to a diver(he uses crankbaits with hooks removed)

Another way to troll is with down riggers. You can see the weight on your graph and depending on the jig or what ever your using for bait ie. 1 oz jig, the jig will drop another 5 to 8 feet below the down rigger weight so you know with a few feet of the depth you are presenting your bait. As you troll and come across fish on your graph make sure your jigs depth is approx 5' above the fish. If you have humps without stumps or other obstructions, set the deep of the jig to drag through the mud on the top of the hump. They will nail as it clears the hump into deeper water. You can do this without down riggers with a 2 oz jig and a 12' hump. I believe the water temp has fish deeper than 12' this time of year.

Please be curteous when trolling around live bait guys. They don't like the motor noise where their fishing.

I have trolled for over 40 years and have tried many different methods and read several books, and articles.
1. Use braid line no more than 30 Lb , 20lb is better. The small diameter line lets any lure made, to sink and go deeper, just real the braid on your reel extremely tight when you put on new line.
2. You need some method of getting a lure that resmebles a small injured shad, deep to where the fish are 15 to 25 feet many times.
3 There are many ways of doing this The Hell Pet is one method that is well documinted. I have used the divers that are available in major stores. I have als used deep diveing crank baits, and the largest rattle traps I can purchase. I also manufacturer a lead, wire combination piece of terminal tackle that will do the job.
4. Most important us take a hook off the diver and use a leader of 4 feet or more and attach a swivil to the diver and a spinner, petspoon , spoon, or flutter spoon to the end of the leader. Detecting the bites is the next step that I will cover if there is interest.
5 I learned to do this by being lazy and not wanting to cast all day so I let the engine pull my lure around.

There may be several different reasons why you were catching smaller fish. One is the size of the bait the bigger fish are feeding on. They might be keyed in on smaller bait or they might be on bigger bait. The lake I fish has millions of smaller just under hybrids. If we fish from shore to about 25 ft of water we catch the smaller ones. If we move out to 35 to 70 ft of water and troll bigger deep divers, we catch bigger hybrids. Deep water combined with big shad equals big hybrids.