Up Your Small Craft Trolling Game with DIY Planer Boards

With a few exceptions, fishing isn’t exactly a contact sport. Most of the time it’s actually more peaceful than a Himalayan house of meditation. But some fishing is even more peaceful than that. We’re talking trolling here.

With the right gear, you could practically knit a sweater and troll at the same time. It doesn’t take much more than a little know-how to throw a line in, paddle, pedal, or motor down your body of water of choice, and haul in some of the lunkers that like to hang out in the cool waters near the bottom.

But there’s trolling and then there’s trolling. We’re using this post to talk about one style move anglers use to maximize their haul: trolling with planer boards.

Using planer boards, you can throw out multiple lines off your stern (cast a wide net, so to speak) and see what bites. A planer board, essentially, is a board that diverts water in one direction. As you move forward, the water pushes the planer boards out to either side of your boat. Besides allowing for multiple trolling lines not getting tangled, it’s also a major stealth move. Your boat’s going to make a fish suspicious at the very least. But if you’re trolling a line a few dozen yards back and 30 yards to your left and right, a fish likely won’t associate your bait with your boat in the least.

Plenty of folks use planer boards with motorboats, and a lot of people are going to tell you that you need a motor to troll effectively. These people are wrong. As YouTuber VinnyJoJoFish demonstrates, they’re also useful with pedal drive kayaks and smaller vessels.

Some people pay much more than you would think for a full planer board set up. But they’re the kind of the thing that you could 100% make in your garage as well.

Others go even more DIY than that.