Added line boosts trolling catches

Walleye pro John Gillman doubles his pleasure with slider-line rigs.

If you think a slider is a White Castle burger or maybe a hard-to-hit baseball pitch partway between a curveball and fastball, you’re only half right. Touring walleye pro John Gillman, best known for his spinner trolling techniques, has added yet another use for the word. In recent years he and several other walleye pros (such as the father-and-son team of Tom and Josh VanderWeide) have been developing and refining a relatively new trolling technique known as slider-line fishing.

“It’s a technique for running more than one trolling presentation off the same rod at the same time,” says Gillman, who hails from Freeland, Michigan, “and an excellent way to cover a lot of water. The guys on the tournament trail who aren’t fishing sliders when trolling open water are at a huge disadvantage. It makes that big of a difference.”

Here’s how the program works. Gillman first attaches a spinner harness (or at times a crankbait, such as a Rapala Shad Rap, Rapala Tail Dancer, or Reef Runner Rip Shad) to the end of his monofilament mainline, then feeds out the desired amount of letback before attaching an inline planer board. He then drops the board in the water and begins letting that out. But once the board is about halfway out—say 50 feet if he wants it running 100 feet from the boat—he attaches an Off Shore Tackle snapweight clip to the line. The clip remains stationary on the mainline.

Next comes the slider line. This is usually a 20- to 40-foot section of 17- to 20-pound-test mono or Seaguar fluorocarbon, with a spinner or crankbait on one end and a large snap swivel on the other. It’s a simple matter of attaching the slider to the mainline. The slider line slides down the mainline until it hits the Off Shore clip, where it stops. Gillman then lets the board out the remaining distance, needing no special refinements or adjustments to compensate for the added slider line.

“I always run a slider lighter and higher in the water column than my mainline, because it doesn’t create as much drag that way,” he says. “If you make sliders too heavy, the whole system starts to collapse in on itself, which defeats the whole purpose of covering a wide swath of water with more baits.”

One of his favorite programs when running sliders is to first put a 1-ounce inline weight on his mainline, followed by a 4-foot spinner rig with a ’crawler harness. He favors #4 or #5 Colorado blades in silver, gold, or copper with half a dozen beads. He ties a #2 single hook at the head of the spinner, followed by a #10 treble at the rear. He also prefers live nightcrawlers to artificials.

Gillman has fished this rig so often that he can place it at precise depths in the water column. For instance, he knows that if he runs it back 40 feet behind a planer board and trolls 1 mph (he’ll troll anywhere from 0.7 to 1.3 mph with slider lines, depending upon conditions), the spinner will be exactly 20 feet down. For his slider line, then, he attaches another spinner, but only puts a 1/4-ounce split shot ahead of it. This setup takes the slider line down to about the 8-foot level. Net result? Gillman is pulling spinners at multiple depths off the same rod at the same time.