Spinner rigs — Best of Both WorldsBy Ted Takasaki and Scott Richardson You can’t beat live bait…or can you? There is a presentation that combines both the natural scent, look and feel of live bait and the flash and attraction of a lure. Spinner rigs offer the best of both worlds and they work especially well on many different lakes across the country as the water warms up during the spring and summer time periods. 
Unlike more stationary ways of presenting live bait like slip bobbers, jigs or Lindy Rigs, spinner rigs are the fastest way to fish live bait effectively. As a result, they can be used as a search tactic to sift through huge areas for fish. That’s especially important when walleyes are in transition from shoreline weeds to the tips of points and larger offshore structure like the mid-lake gravel bars or mud flats. They can be fished with hand-held rods to stay tight to weed edges or on planer boards to take them far to the sides of the boat and cover more water. They can be trolled or drifted. By using different weighting systems and different-sized weights, spinner rigs can be fished from just below the surface to the bottom and around weeds, rock and other cover. Your bait choices can range from nightcrawlers to leeches to minnows. Blade sizes and styles can be changed in a snap with Lindy’s X-Change System. How much more versatile can you get? The basicsSpinner rigs, usually effective once the water temps get above 50 degrees, consist of a clevis, a blade, and beads to add attraction and keep the blade away from two snelled hooks for nightcrawlers and or one hook for leeches and minnows.  Learn to tie your own or buy commercially-produced ones like the tried and true, single-hook Red Devil Spinners and the double-hook Little Joe Crawler Harness. The new Little Joe Red Devil Supreme Spinners now come with Techni-Glo colors and holographic finishes.
Snell length varies from 36-inches to 42-inches for most commercially made ones to longer if you make your own. But, commercial lengths will usually suffice. Blade choices include style, size and color. It’s hard to beat a Colorado blade for most situations. They turn well at slow speeds to produce both flash and vibration. Indiana blades have to be trolled at faster speeds, which can be a drawback. Most effect trolling speed range for spinner rigs is usually 1 to 1.5 mph, just fast enough to make the blade spin. Walleyes have to be very aggressive to push speeds of 2 mph and more. Speed control is critical to working spinners effectively. The use of a drift sock while drifting or trolling can make the difference between catching and just fishing. Read the rest of this article and all the Lindy Fishing Tips » | 
This in-line configuration offers a more stealthy presentation, effortlessly slipping through weeds, wood and rocks, while keeping the bait glued to the bottom, where those extra-finicky fish are so dad-blamed determined to stay.
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