“A rigger ball is the ultimate banging tool,” he says. “As you’d suspect, getting close and personal with bottom hazards creates violent contact between the downrigger ball and boulders. Everything goes haywire, camera and ball bouncing, hammering rocks, and stirring sediment. The lure digs in, smacks rocks and caroms left, right. It’s amazing how much abuse those lures take. About that time a big muskie shows up like a heat-seeking missile, always beneath and just to the side of the lure.
“The worst thing you can do is slow down. Muskies don’t have brakes. Slow down abruptly from a 3.5 mph troll and a fish will scoot right past the lure under the boat. Rarely do they get back on the lure after that. To trigger strikes it works at times to throttle up from 3 mph to 4 mph to 6 mph or more. Or drop the ball into headbanger mode by moving in tight to rocks or by banging bottom. I don’t know if it’s the sound of the collision, the sediment kicking off bottom, or the interruption in lure movement that triggers strikes,” he says. “But there’s magic in collision.”
›Muskies like giant spinnerbaits, often better than crankbaits—“Anglers generally assume plugs are the key lure choice for summer and fall trolling,” Schwartz says. “I’ve caught plenty of big fish with classic choices—Believers, Grandmas, Jakes. But the only lure that has thus far consistently triggered big fish is a giant spinnerbait. Honest, I see this as a big breakthrough.
“With plugs, muskies often seem just as interested in checking the boat’s prop or the downrigger ball as looking at the lure. I’m not crazy— underwater footage tells the story,” he says. “The first strike I captured on camera after many hours of trolling with classic crankbaits was when I switched to a big spinnerbait. So I went into my workshop and didn’t leave until I had something as big as and even more distracting than a boat propeller or a downrigger ball.”
Dive plugs have lips that yield built-in depth control, spinnerbaits don’t. The thing is that few anglers have ever ground a spinnerbait into the bottom before. You can do that behind a downrigger ball.
Schwartz’s best lure has been his new creation he calls the Train Wreck Spinnerbait. The 15-inch spinnerbait has a 7-inch plastic curlytail, silicone skirt, and tandem #10 Indiana and #8 Colorado blades. “It’s a nicely balanced lure that muskies like to eat,” he says. “Even at this size the bait casts well, too. It produced one of my bigger muskies last season while casting, a fish I found while video trolling.
“The thing is that spinnerbaits just haven’t been placed into the right depths, as cranks have while trolling, so we haven’t known how well muskies responded to them in a classic trolling situation. Maybe it’s that they haven’t seen them in this situation before. Muskies have one of the best-developed lateral line systems among freshwater fish. They are highly tuned into vibration, sound, and perhaps even scent.”
