by Bryan Youness for The Mack Attack, February 23, 2015

Planer boards have been most commonly associated with fishing big water for salmon and lake trout with outrigger masts and releases clipped on the planer board line. Now with growing popularity of inline planer boards it very easy to spread your lines away from the boat when fishing for other species. I use them a lot when trolling Mack’s Lure crawler harnesses.

They attach to your line by a simple pinch pad fitting, and they can be added to, or removed from, your line in seconds. They are ideal for trolling in an area where you want to fish lures at different depths. One example would be using planer boards to send a shallow bait out from the boat and have it fishing within a few feet of the shore. You can then run another planer board farther from the shore with a deeper presentation. Meanwhile your boat is in deep water where you are less likely to spook shallow feeding fish.

Another situation where planer boards have an advantage is trolling rocky shores that have an erratic bottom contour. With planers you can send lures out to run along reefs and through rock piles or any other obstruction that could either damage your boat or propeller while you stay out in the deeper water. The most common is to simply spread out your baits and cover a much greater area.

Planer boards are available from various manufacturers with the leading brands being Offshore Tackle,Tru-Trac, Church Tackle and Big Jon. I prefer the Offshore Tackle planer board. It has the advantage of being able to be used in a wide variety of ways. It can stay on your line or slide down the line when a fish hits. You can use the add-on "tattle flag" conversion that has a flag on the board that folds back when you have a fish on. This will save you from dragging a small fish for miles that might not show on the board. It will also alert you when your lure has picked up weed as the flag will fold back. The Offshore Tackle planer can also be outfitted with lights for trolling at night.

I personally do not like to learn from my own fishing mistakes, especially on tournament day, so here is the best advice that I can give. The first thing I do when I purchase a new planer board is remove the front release that is included and replace it with an OR16 release. The difference in the stock release and the OR16 is not only in the tension, but also there is a center button that holds the line better and can prevent having to circle back to pick up strayed boards.

When loading this front release I also will wrap the line around the top half and back through the plunger again. This will prevent the board from sliding down the line and forcing the fish off the hook.
Another common misconception is that planer boards are just for crankbaits and for trolling spoons. If you are not using them for pulling spinners you’re missing the boat. Any of the planer boards can be used to pull spinners and harnesses. Whether you are fishing shallow or deep, you can present spinners, worm harnesses and floats directly to shallow feeding fish or fish holding tight to deep structure. I like to rig a variety of types of spinners from the Double Whammy Ring Master to one of the many color variations of the Wally Pops in the Crawler Series.

To present these baits to deeper fish there are many methods you can use. The most popular method is the use of snap weights. Snap weights can be quickly attached to the line and the weight can be changed to the depth you are trying to obtain. Snap weights use the same OR16 release mentioned earlier. The button in the center of the pad will help prevent losing the release and weight.

After trying the basic planer board setup with crawler harnesses and snap weights, you will find countless opportunities to make changes and improvements to suit your needs or the individual situation.