MinnKota's i-Pilot provides the ultimate boat control for dragging jigs
Navigation:
Dragging jigs is one of my favorite multi-species presentations, which is effective during all months of the open-water calendar. Because my home waters, Pool 4 of the Mississippi River, never freeze, my open-water calendar is 12 months long! During the summer, we drag jigs tipped with leeches or crawlers for sumo summer walleyes. The fish shown at right, caught on a 1/16 oz blue jig tipped with a leech, was featured in a jig-dragging episode of In-Depth Outdoors TV. You can view that episode as an embedded video at the bottom of this page. As the water cools, we drag jigs tipped with finesse plastics for giant winter walleye and sauger under low-light conditions. While the baits and optimum times for jig dragging may change as summer turns to winter, our success rates do not....jig dragging puts fish in the boat, 12 months a year!
Dragging jigs DEMANDS precision in boat control. Not only must anglers maintain the boat, and therefore their baits, in the proper depth of water (which can vary from season to season and day to day), but these baits must also be presented at the proper speed to keep them within a typically narrow strike zone. During our current cold-water period, I have applied the Cruise Control and Track Record/Playback features of the MinnKota i-Pilot rigged on my Terrova 101 to my jig dragging presentation with GREAT success. Read on to learn how to do this in your own boat.
Recall that boat speed is not recorded by the Track Record function. It is possible to control and adjust boat speed manually (using the foot control or the i-Pilot remote) while a recorded track is being played back. However, speed can also be controlled very precisely using the i-Pilot Cruise Control function. Cruise control permits the angler to set a certain GPS speed that the i-Pilot will maintain, and it also allows the angler to make adjustments to a selected speed in 0.1 mph increments. We used both of these Cruise Control functions as we dragged our jigs through this area:
Dr. Jason Halfen
Professional Walleye Angler
Navigation:
1. Notice that the differences between the first, recorded track and subsequent passes along that route (using the Track to Start and Track to End functions) are very small. Deviations from the recorded track, caused by the interaction of opposing 0.6 mph current (moving from left to right) and a 5-10 mph wind (moving from right to left), are automatically compensated for by i-Pilot.
Dragging jigs has always been a go-to presentation for me when targeting shallow winter sauger and walleye, and the MinnKota i-Pilot has made me a far more efficient angler by allowing me to focus almost exclusively on my dragging presentation, rather than sinmple boat control tasks. The results, such as the 20" walleye shown at right, really do speak for themselves.
The i-Pilot Track Record function is a wonderful tool for maintaining the proper boat position for dragging jigs. In the winter, we typically focus on relatively shallow water for dragging jigs, from 6 to perhaps 12 feet of water. Complicating an angler's efforts to maintain the boat along the proper path are current and wind. The Track Record and Playback functions automatically compensate for these complications, keeping the boat moving along the recorded track without any additional input from the angler. Let me illustrte how we used Track Record on my most recent trip, with the help of a screen capture from my Humminbird 1197:
One of the areas we targeted was a shallow rock bar that extends from shore out into 20+ feet of water. Walleye and sauger move onto the rocks at dawn and dusk to feed. As we entered this area for the first time, I engaged the Track Record function at the positon noted by the green arrow. We dragged jigs through this area until we reached the postion noted by the red arrow. At that point, I stopped recording the track. Now that a track has been recorded across this rock bar, I used the Track to Start function to direct i-Pilot to follow that recorded track from my current position back to the beginning of the recorded track (the green arrow). Pressing Track to Start caused i-Pilot to turn the boat in a relatively sharp loop (you can see several to the left of the red arrow) and then proceed back along the recorded track to the green arrow. Once I passed the start of the track, I simply pressed Track to End to turn the boat around and proceed back to the end of the track (the red arrow). We made three full loops through this area before moving on to the next jig dragging zone. Let me point out two things about the use of Track Record in this presentation:
2. My boat followed the track in a completely automated fashion, requiring only that I push Track to Start or Track to End to get my boat moving along the track in the selected direction. i-Pilot allowed me to focus on fishing, rather than worrying about my boat's position.
Our initial pass was an upstream pass, and I set a Cruise Control speed of 0.3 mph for our upstream pass. Dragging jigs upstream is a slower presentation than dragging downstream, as a slower speed is necessary to keep the dragged jigs close to the bottom. When we turned to drag downstream, I increased the Cruise Control speed to 0.7 mph, just slightly faster than the current in this area. Once this new speed was set, I relied on i-Pilot to accurately match my set speed, which is did flawlessly. When the upstream wind slowed our boat speed, i-Pilot automatically compensated by increasing power to the prop until our target speed was reestablished. Once again, i-Pilot allowed me to focus on fishing, rather than dealing with the effects that the opposing current and wind had on my boat's speed.
To see other real-world applications of the i-Pilot Track Record and Cruise Control functions, check out the other instructional pieces that are available under the "i-Pilot Index" buttons at the top and bottom of this page. If you'd like more information on the jig dragging presentation, please read my article covering the presentation at this link:
Finally, please take a few moments to watch our jig dragging episode from In-Depth Outdoors TV. That eposide is available below:
