And while winter mackerel fishing has dwindled, his trolling design may catch on because summer mackerel handlining is an ever-growing industry.
While a traditional mackerel stripper has an incoming roller, its main drawback for summer fishing when slowly trolling in a circle to ‘find and keep the fish’ is that without a guard to keep the line on the roller, it falls over the aft end of the roller and gets trapped in the axle.
Skipper Jolliff took his ideas to a local stainless steel fabricator and asked for a stripper of smaller width, without a roller but with a large diameter half-circle plate, to gently guide the fish to the stripper bars rather than over a relatively small diameter roller.
He
