Trolling is a great way to cover water looking for active fish, you also get a good idea of the layout of the lake. It makes it easy to find good weed beds when your bait fowls. Trolling with big bucktail(cowgirls/siligirls) you can run very shallow, sometimes as shallow as 5 feet. The trick to this is to keep the boat moving fast 3mph on the low end and 5-7 on the top end. There are times that the baits may break the surface, if this happens you are moving a little to fast, slow it down just a little. The perfect situation is to have the bait bulge the surface without breaking it. With bucktail trolling, you can go just about anywhere. This is a great tactic for big expansive weed flats or trolling a weed line. Throw a planer board on to get the bait out away from the boat is not a bad idea either. The other thing to think about when trolling shallow is to troll a topwater, sounds strange, but it does work great under the correct conditions. If you are looking at taking a step off the weedline or break line, trolling cranks is the way to go. Grandmas,Jakes,Dunwrights, just about any crank will work. The key is to mix it up. Run one on the outide that will get down deep and then run a shallow lip crank (MANS are my favorite) on the inside. Trolling with cranks you will want to run the speed a little slower, the cranks will fowl when run to fast, so you will have to do a little trial and error at the side of the boat to see how fast you can run any given crank. Just let out about 5-10 feet of line and adjust your speed to see how the bait runs. With cranks you can work the outside of a weedline or breakline but you should also look to open water as well. The fact is, the weed edge and breakline get beat on very hard by every angler looking for muskies. The fish get preasured off the break and suspend over deep water. You will find that the fish will maintain the same depth that they were sitting on at the break, but they now may be over very deep water. Last fall we boated a number of fish over 60-70 feet of water. The fish were only down about 15-20 feet. These fish are not as easy to target, because it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. When working open water, trust your eletronics. Go out to no mans land and look for baitfish. You will see clouds of them, this is what you want to troll. To make things a little easier, watch to see where those clouds of baitfish are located in the water colume and match your baits to the desired water depth you want to taget. The other thing to look at on any given lake, is what the muskies have for a food source. If it Mille Lacs, perch colored baits are great, so is anything that is white, matching the Tullies. Walleye colored baits also get the nod!. Hope this helps a little. It is something to see when a muskie hits a bait that is moving at 5+_MPH, they are angry 
