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This summer, I’m getting back into fishing for a couple of reasons:  (1) it’s a nice pastime that allows me to spend some quality time with my son, son-in-law, and anybody else who comes to visit; and (2) it’s a fun way to put a little bit of variety in the meat that we eat, supplementing what we can get at the store with something that we really can’t. To maximize the yield of my fishing I’m trying a couple of new things:

1. I’m going to try my hand at fly-fishing
2. my state allows trotlining.

For those who don’t know, trotlining is a passive fishing method where you sink a number of hooks into a body of water all on a central mainline, bait all those hooks (chicken livers are popular) as you put them in, and leave them there for a while.  Come back and check your lines later to see what you caught.  A lot of states don’t allow trotlining, but since mine does I’m going to give it a shot.

What I like about the idea of trotlining is it’s something that I could do over the course of a couple of days and do other things, say fish for other kinds of fish while the trotline is doing its job.  For example, I could set a trotline on a Friday evening, come back on Saturday morning to check and re-bait the line, fish for the day with my spinning rod or my fly rod (or both) and then come back to pull in the trotline a second time. Take all those fish home, clean them, and freeze them or have a big old-fashioned fish-fry!

Primarily, trotlining is going to be for bottom-feeding fish like catfish. All the fish that I’ve ever seen anybody catch on a trotline are catfish. Some of them are huge, which makes it a very attractive idea.  I’ve heard it’s common to get the occasional turtle along with the catfish.

Check your State’s Regulations!

Before embarking on using a trotline, make sure to check your State’s regulations. I moved a few years ago from California where trotlining is completely against state law. But as I was reviewing the regulations for Indiana (where I live now), I found that trotlining is legal. There are a few rules here about it that are pretty simple, but they’re not anything to get too excited about. Here are the rules for Indiana in 2021 (please check with your state): 

• an individual person may have a single trotline active at any given time
• it can have no more than 50 single- or multi-barbed hooks and 
• the trotline must have a readable tag showing the name and address of the owner or their DNR-issued customer ID number 
• the trotline must be checked at least once every 24 hours and 
• there are few other things like you can’t use a trotline in Lake Michigan at all or within 300 yards of a partial or full dam structure

Again, I cannot stress this enough: check your State’s regulations.

Materials

The materials for building a DIY Trotline are pretty simple: 

• Some high strength line like 200  lb twisted line for the main line
• Some medium strength line such as 65 pound line for the droppers
• Number 4 snelled hooks
• Size 7 barrel swivels
• 2 clip rings or carabiners
• A container to keep the trotline in
• A length of scrap foam long enough to fit around the inside of your container.

I was able to get almost all of the materials I needed at Walmart very inexpensively. I picked up the two carabiners at Harbor Freight for just a few pennies each, and the container is a recycled OxiClean container from our laundry room.  I had some foam left over from reupholstering some chairs, so I used some of that.  Look around your house for what might work.

Tools

The tools needed for building your trotline are also pretty simple:

• A knife or scissors to cut the line with
• A lighter to burn the ends of the lines so they don’t fray
• A drill with a 3/16 drill bit (I like 3/16, since it’s large enough to let all the water out, yet small enough to keep everything from falling out the bottom)

The Process

Prep the container

To get the container ready for the trout line, start by drilling some 3/16 holes in the bottom of the container. This will allow water to drain out and prevent your lines from rotting over time because they’re constantly sitting in water. I space my holes apart by about a quarter inch. Just as long as there are enough there to drain the water out it doesn’t have to be completely covered in holes but at least a few to drain the water out is enough.

I cut a 1-inch by 1-inch length of foam about 18 in long so it can fit around the inside of the container. On one side, about every half inch or so, I cut a slit halfway through the foam.  I sprayed a little 3M super 77 glue across the side opposite all of the slits, let it get tacky and pressed it onto the inside of the mouth of the container about a quarter inch below the top. This gives me a place to hold each of the hooks safely when they’re not being used and gives me the bonus of being able to pull each one up a little bit, bait them all in the container and then feed them out into the water. With the container ready, let’s move on to the trotline itself.

The mainline

I decided I wanted to make my first Trotline 24 hooks primarily because the hooks come in packages of 12. I start by threading 24 Barrel swivels on to the 200-lb mainline from one end, all side by side by side. After that I tied a bowline knot in the end and clipped one of the carabiners to it.

Now it’s time to start tying knots. I’m using 18-inch droppers about 6 feet apart, so to prevent tangles I’m going to start about 12 ft in from the carabiner where I will tie in the first Barrel Swivel so since I’m about 6 ft tall, I just grabbed the carabiner in one hand stretch my arms out wide with the line held in the both hands, grab the line at my left hand and stretch my arms out wide again.  That puts me at about 12 ft; I grab the line right there (keeping the line on the spool helps this process a lot) then all I did next was tie a Half Hitch (make a loop, pass the spool through the loop, pull it tight) and then took one of those barrel swivels, slid it down next to the knot, and do it again. Tie this second half hitch maybe an inch or so from the first one with the barrel swivel in between. With the container on the floor, if you start by just putting the carabiner down into the container and then as you go through a length of line, you can drop it into the container in order to avoid tangles. I stretched my arms out once, tied a knot at that point, slid in a second barrel swivel, added another half hitch, and continued the process until I had each of the 24 barrel swivels captured between two knots. After the last swivel, I again went two arms widths from the last swivel and cut off the line.  After burning both loose ends, I tied another bowline knot. I clipped the second carabiner to that bowline and dropped it in the container on top of everything else.

Making the droppers

Making the droppers is easy, but can be tiring for your fingers.  Take that 65 lb line and cut off about two foot lengths, one for each of the droppers you’re going to make (24 in my case).  Make sure as you cut your line that you burn both ends-the end you just cut for the dropper, and the end still on this pool.  Once you have all of your droppers cut it’s a matter of using a fisherman’s knot to tie a hook onto each one [insert link to knot tutorial here] and then tying the other end of that dropper to one of the barrel swivels on your main line. I found it easier to make all 24 of the droppers first, and then attach them all to the main line. You will use the same fisherman’s knot to attach the dropper to the main line as you did to attach the hook to the dropper. I also found it easiest to feed the main line all the way out of the container onto the floor next to where I was sitting and then feed it back into the container, putting a hook in one of the foam slots as I got each dropper made.

Summary

The only thing left for me to do is try it out. I hope I get to do that around Father’s Day. The other thing I did with the container is I wrote with a sharpie that it contains a trotline and the number of hooks on that line on the lid before I clip the lid on to contain everything. We still need to build or get a hold of a couple of other things in order to go trotline fishing.  We need a buoy for each end of the trotline so we can find it again when we come back (this is where I mark with my DNR ID), and weights also for each end – they only need to be 5 or 10 pounds each.  I’m going to try making weights with concrete but I don’t know how well that’s going to work