A four-rod dipsy diver program off the tip of Long Point produced a personal best Lake Erie rainbow trout and a first ever coho salmon for former Hooked TV host Averie Rose, who released a previously unaired charter trip on her YouTube channel as Lake Erie's spring trolling season warms up.
The trip pairs Rose with childhood friend Allan, who runs charters with his father out of Port Owen as part of Jimmy Rian Fishing Charters. Rose, who hosted the four-season Hooked TV show, said she had not previously had the rights to publish the footage. "I'm super excited to share this one because the trolling season is going to be heating up within the next couple weeks. I know people that are already catching some fish out there trolling. May is a great time to fish for salmon, to fish for rainbows."
The session ran a four-rod dipsy program out the back of Rose's boat, using the legal limit of two rods per angler. "Right now we have four dipsies out — no leadcore, anything else," Allan explained at the start of the session. "We have them on inside divers and outsides running bright spoons like silvers and stuff like that. We're all about 160 at 200 back."
Allan made the case that Long Point's offshore trolling fishery is dramatically underrated. "A lot of people think of Lake Erie out in the deep to be a walleye fishery," he said, "but out here we have lots of rainbows, coho salmon, and chinook salmon, and a few lake trout out here right now."
Speed control proved to be the day's biggest variable. With the wind dropping out, the pair went from running an electric trolling motor downhill at the start of the session to using the main outboard for forward speed and the electric for steering. "In order for us to get good speed and control properly, we are using the big motor now," Rose said. The target was a 2.1 to 2.3 mph trolling band — the speed at which the boat caught most of its fish.
The session produced six fish, with the highlight a rainbow trout that hit at 160 ft back and ran straight to 220 ft before stopping at a knot in the line. "He went out 220 feet and I thought I was going to lose him for a second because he was on the surface, but I got him," Rose said after netting her personal best Lake Erie rainbow. The first coho came on a fresh blue-and-chartreuse Matrix spoon Allan had just dropped down — the bait change paying off almost immediately.
Bait selection rotated all day. Allan kept tweaking spoons, depths, and switching to crankbaits when the bite slowed. "Allan likes to say that the spoons are killer on Lake Erie," Rose noted, "but currently the crankbait is what's going on and what they're eating."
Rose's takeaway for anglers heading out for the May trolling window: keep moving, keep tweaking, and trust the dipsy diver release. "On dipsies, you kind of want to let them down with your drag," Allan said, demonstrating how to ease the spoon back without the bail flipping the hooks ahead of the puck and tangling. The chaos of the day's coho — a salmon that span at the net and shredded the rigging — also produced his most practical tip: "When we got big messes like this, it's better to cut it off and restart. All the line, the hooks, that's pretty much garbage."
Rose closed the session with three rainbows, one coho and two more fish in the box, and a note that she will be back trolling Long Point as soon as her university exams wrap.