The rod tip twitches in the water as you sit on edge of the boat watching. On your sonar screen you see a wad of salmon hanging at forty feet. But you feel like your lure is still up near surface. What happened? How did you miss them? They was twenty feet out. And that’s all it takes… All it ever took when you were trying to put something down for crappie on a tight line.
The problem usually isn’t your gear or your bait. Most times it was just that you didn’t know how far down your Dipsy Diver was actualy sitting. With a device that planes down on its own with water pressure, it can be surprisingly complex. The size of the disc itself, the speed, the line diameter and even length of the line all play into depth. Get one of these factors wrong, and you’re fishing blind.
How to Control Your Lure Depth
The relationships can be explained well by chart in the beginning (above) since depth isn’t necessarily what you’d expect to find easy to understand. For example, most folks think that more line they let out the deeper the lure dives… right? Well yes but not linearly. Here’s how: Letting out a Size 1 Dipsy with 100 feet of line has the bait suspended at 19 feet. Now take that same lure and let out double amount of line, which is 200 feet. It doesn’t goes twice as deep; it only goes an additional 16 feet deep. So now the lure is 35 feet down. That’s not twice the distance! This is why it tricks people all the time; you don’t simply double your line and double your depth, you must learn to fish smarter and understand how the lure works in the water.
Before you ever pull the trigger and throw, your first true decision is choosing the appropriate size disc. A size 0 is reserved for those shallow finesse presentations. A size 3 unit is one heckuva heavy lifter. It can blast through extreme conditions to put casts out beyond sixty feet. But most anglers find themselves between sizes, needing a Size 1. This is kind of the sweet spot. It will push out to forty-nine feet at three hundred yards of line. This covers the main productive areas in both coastal river and Great Lake systems. Just remember the key isn’t necessarily grabbing the largest tool in the shed but rather matching the disc to the probable depth the fish is holding.
And speed matter as well. Trolling faster causes the diver to run shallow due to increased lift on the disc surface. Slow it down and it digs deeper. If you’re covering water and speeding up to do so, you immediately lose your depth. So you’ll need to switch to a bigger diver or let out more line. But it’s a constant presentation/speed balancing act. The inverse relationship of the graphic helps show this visually, which also reminds us that control isn’t just about setting it and forgetting it but adjusting to match.
The type of line you use also plays a big role, though most anglers don’t think about it much. Braids are thinner and not as buoyant as monofilament. They generate less drag at the surface, which lets the Dipsy get down farther with the same length of line out. So when you go from mono to braid you need to be able to compensate for that because you’ll overshoot your desired depth by 10-feet or more if you don’t adjust your reel counter accordingly. Fluorocarbon lines fall somewhere inbetween. This explains why two buddies can have the exact same set-up with their Dipsys and pay out the same amount of line, yet one person ends up fishing shallower and the other deeper. The diameter of their line is different which greatly changes the drag profile.
There’s another level of strategy: The offset settings. To prevent rods from tangling on smaller boats, you angle the side plane which spreads your lines out wider. But that comes at a cost. Less vertical pressure means less depth. That’s sort of the give-and-take. You expand your coverage by angling out (width), but you also reduce your ability to reach as far down. Most guys begins with no offset for max depth, then tinker outward as needed for spacing.
The last piece of the puzzle is lure pairing. These rigs became popular for trolling because a diver pulls hard, and a spoon has the action and weight to match that pulling power. A flasher and fly rig also pair very nicely. The combination adds vibration but does not add much drag to fight the dive of the diver. You want to balance out the system so the Dipsy can do its thing without having to fight the lure behind it.
Learning to dial-in the Dipsy Diver isn’t about memorization. It’s an understanding of how depth, line and speed are all connected. When that click happens you’re going to have a few full rods where there were missed strikes before. The next time you see fish on your sonar beneath you, it won’t be a guessing game on where your lure is. You should of known.