Back-Trolling in a Kayak

I’ll admit right up front that I’m not a kayak fishing sharpie. I do enjoy kayak fishing, but more commonly set out on one of my boats. Recently I was fishing near a kayak angling friend, and observed him using a tactic that was utterly deadly: back-trolling.

I was trolling two lines from my boat, while he was also pulling two. His kayak is set up with two adjustable rodholders forward of the seat, which can be set to point almost 180 degrees from one another. By casting out forward and then pedaling backwards, he could sit comfortably while watching both lines.

At first, this might seem no different from the way I was trolling. But through the day several differences became apparent. The biggest was that he got fewer tangles than I did, because his lines were spaced widely apart. As you can see from the picture, the way the rods sit there’s over 10 feet between the tips. On my (much wider) boat, with its standard gunwale holders angled out at around 45-degrees and sitting nearly vertical, there’s under eight feet between the tips. While that might not seem like a big deal, through the course of the day I had three fairly massive tangles when a fish took the bait, then swam into the other line. With his wider spread, he had one (and he caught more fish than I did). When you’re trolling slowly there’s always a 50-50 chance the fish will take off in the direction of your other line and in this particular case that spread gave him a leg up.

He also had a leg up in the comfort department, because trolling in reverse he could eyeball both lines at all times. On my boat, on the other hand, I had to constantly turn my head to watch them. Eventually, this put a crick in my neck. And from a pure fish-catching standpoint, when I had to turn my head the other way for a few moments just to stretch my neck out, it meant I wasn’t eyeballing the lines. This was a live bait slow-trolling scenario, so pulling the rod out of the holder and immediately feeding the fish line was critical – and again, he had a leg up.

Will you catch more fish when back-trolling livies out of a kayak as opposed to trolling in forward out of a boat? Maybe, maybe not. But I know that on this day Eric out-fished me – and I’m pretty sure these factors contributed to his success. So the next time I try slow-trolling live baits in protected waters, I’ll probably leave the boat in the yard and shove the kayak into the back of the truck, instead.