A previously unaired Lake Erie trolling session has surfaced on YouTube as the spring run heats up, with former Hooked TV host Averie Rose releasing footage of a six-fish day off the tip of Long Point with childhood friend and charter operator Allan.
The pair ran a four-rod dipsy diver program — two divers per angler under Ontario rules — out the back of a Yamaha 175 SHO-powered boat. The opening setup put the inside divers shallow and the outsides deeper, with bright spoons rotating through silvers. "We're all about 160 at 200 back," Allan said, referring to the diver setting and lead length.
The session reframed Long Point as more than a walleye fishery. "A lot of people think of Lake Erie out in the deep to be a walleye fishery," Allan said, "but out here we have lots of rainbows, coho salmon, and chinook salmon, and a few lake trout out here right now."
Speed proved to be the most important lever. With the wind dropping, the boat shifted from electric-only downhill trolling to running the main outboard for forward speed and steering with the bow electric — a workaround for the lack of a drift sock. The target band was 2.1 to 2.3 mph, the speed at which most fish hit on the day.
The standout fish was a rainbow trout that hit at 160 ft back and ran to 220 ft before a knot in the line stopped the spool. "He went out 220 feet and I thought I was going to lose him for a second because he was on the surface, but I got him," Rose said after netting her personal best Lake Erie rainbow. Her first ever coho salmon followed on a freshly dropped blue-and-chartreuse Matrix spoon. "Allan had just changed up spoons and we were turning around and he hit really hard."
Bait choice rotated through the morning. Allan kept tweaking spoons, depths and crankbait colours, with the day quietly settling on a crankbait pattern over the spoons that started the session. The other on-water lesson was process discipline: every fish meant retying. "When we got big messes like this, it's better to cut it off and restart," Allan said after the coho span at the net and shredded a rod's worth of rigging. "All the line, the hooks, that's pretty much garbage."
Rose's takeaway for the fishery: keep something moving, change something every drop, and book a charter with Jimmy Rian Fishing Charters if you want to compress the learning curve before May's trolling window opens up.
