Jesse Ying and guest angler Jamie Ward opened Jessmeisters Outdoors' 2026 walleye season on Lake Erie with a trip that doubled as a trolling tutorial, publishing a step-by-step look at how the pair use the Precision Trolling Data app, Offshore snap weights and a two-bait rotation to get baits to the correct running depth.
The day arrived after brutal pre-trip conditions. "This is our first ice out trip of the year and we just landed this baby," Ying opens the video before walking through the day's data. By his own account the lake had been hammered the day before: "The day before we got there, we had an extremely hard blow on the lake with 70 mph north winds. So the lake was very beat up." Despite the chop the group landed nine walleye for the day, topped by a 7.9 lb fish he called "not a giant, but a really good solid fish considering the conditions."
Ying's presentation leans heavily on two crankbaits. "We are trolling Bandit deep walleye crankbaits and Smithwick Perfect Tens," he said, describing the Bandits as "an extremely popular bait on Lake Erie" with a long track record on the big water. The Perfect 10, he noted, pairs a slimmer body profile with a tungsten thump rattle that creates a pronounced side-to-side action — the kind of subtle-but-loud combination that does damage on lethargic pre-spawn walleye.
The core of the tutorial is a plug for the Precision Trolling Data app, the Mark and Jake Romanac product released in October 2013 that Ying calls the 'Trollers' Bible'. "This thing is amazing," he said, before walking through how to select the Bandit deep walleye in 5/8 ounce on 10 lb Berkeley XT monofilament and set a target depth. For a 15-foot run, the chart calls for 59 ft of line out plus a planer board — straightforward enough for shallower targets.
Where the Precision Trolling method earns its keep is deeper. Straight-line, Bandits top out at roughly 22 ft of depth on 195 ft of mono — a long leash that limits boat control. Ying's fix is the Precision Trolling '50 plus 2' technique: "When you let out 50 ft of line, you're going to put a snap weight on there, a 2-ounce snap weight. We use Offshore snap weights. They're great products." A further 50 ft of line behind the weight and a 2 oz Offshore snap weight running at 1.5 mph gets the same Bandit down to 34 ft with only 100 ft of line out total. "That's kind of a game changer. That helps a lot," Ying said, noting the technique allowed the crew to crawl the crankbaits slowly through deeper staging fish.
Boat control was as important as rig selection. Ward repeatedly called for slower speeds as fish started to load up. "He slowed the boat down, too," one crew member noted after another hook-up, and the day's signature 7.9 lb fish was directly attributed to a single adjustment: "You made that one adjustment. Slow down."
Ying finished the video with a reminder that calibrated line counters are critical if precision trolling data is to work — a separate tutorial is on the way — and credited Jamie Ward for the guide-quality boat work across nine fish in rough Erie chop.
