More Ways to Three-Way

The easily adjustable nature of three-way rigs makes them perhaps the most versatile of all livebait systems; simply changing the lengths of leaders and droppers and varying components achieve different looks and triggering capabilities with the same basic rigging. Short (12- to 15-inch) droppers and leaders position baits near bottom and minimize snags in river current. Average length (2- to 4-foot) setbacks and droppers present lures and baits a bit off bottom. Lengths of 6 to 10 feet add finesse to riggings and position the bait well off bottom—a perfect adjustment if your electronics indicate suspended fish significantly above the basin.

Don’t worry about netting fish with a long dropper, either. When you reel up and the fish is ready to be netted, just take a swipe at the fish and leave the sinker hanging in the water; after all, you don’t have to net the sinker, do you? Land the fish first, then grab the line by hand and lift in the weight.

Three Amigos

Reservoirs—Jim Muzynoski, touring walleye pro from Montana, frequently uses a modified three-way rig on Fort Peck Reservoir. “I like to use a 1/2-ounce jig as my dropper, and I add a stinger hook and minnow. About two feet above the jig, I tie in my three-way swivel and add a 6-foot leader to a #2 hook, stinger hook, and minnow. Adding stingers allows me to move as quickly as possible (while still maintaining a near-vertical presentation) and be able to set the hook at the slightest hint of a strike.

“In Montana, you can use two hooks per line, and this setup not only doubles your chances of catching fish, but covers two different depths. Fish it like a jig, lifting up and down, on and off bottom. Most of the time, the jig catches the most fish. But at times, 80 percent of the fish come on the upper snell. Switch the hook to a floating jighead and minnow if you need more attraction and flotation. Also, we have some big crappies in Fort Peck, and they like to hit the suspended minnow rather than the big jig.

“Three-ways even have an ice fishing application. We have some fair current in the western arm of Fort Peck, and if you simply use a split shot to weight your minnow rig when fishing tip-ups, the current can sweep it up off bottom, out of the kill zone. But if you put a heavier sinker at the bottom and the minnow up above, it hangs vertically below the tip-up, and you’re on target.”

Lakes—Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota has long been a hotbed of three-way rigging spinner-crawler combos, typically incorporating long (8- to 10-foot) snells of light (6-pound-test) line, and tiny #3 or smaller silver Colorado blades. Even bead color comes into play, with a penchant for green reflecting off the shiny blade to imitate yellow perch forage. Does this degree of fine-tuning make a difference? You bet. In his thirty years on the big lake, legendary Mille Lacs guide Joe Fellegy designed and refined the very same combos for his clients. Today, similar finesse rigs are marketed by Gopher Fishing Tackle.

Mille Lacs’ unique midlake mudflat structures require special adaptations, since sinkers set down into or dragged across the soft bottom penetrate the oozy organic base—something akin to peat moss—and the bait is lost amidst a cloud of disturbed “mud.” Hence, guides like Fellegy would set their lines to suspend spinner rigs just above the soft bottom, place the many rods of their launch customers in holders, and either drift or troll (depending on wind conditions), gliding the spinner combos at or just above the fish’s level as the baits passed over and around the flats and across the adjacent basins. In doing so, if the sinker struck and penetrated the soft bottom, the high-riding spinner was still visible above the mud, due to the length of the dropper line. The result was a deadly system, today applied elsewhere to fish across expansive basins with similar effectiveness.