Hey Dogfish,

I've got a couple of suggestions:

If you want to try to use spoons or plugs, I think it's really important to still use scent. I think the best is Smelly Jelly, either the blue (herring) or the yellowish-white (anchovie), and get the actual jelly ones, with the consistency of Vaseline, not the oil ones in a bottle, which are also made by "Smelly Jelly" brand. You need to mask your human scent on the gear, especially if you smoke or touch yourself a lot :-) You can also spray your gear with WD40, that _never_ hurts.
I think it's also important to try to roughly "match the hatch", in other words, use spoons that are about the same size as the naturally-occuring bait you're finding out there.

I'm not sure what the problem was with your setup, but we've done really well on my boat using no bait at all this year, sounds like pretty much the same as you, 70 fish to the boat in one night and one morning's fishing. So I've got a couple of question: how fast were you trolling? Exactly what spoons & plugs were you using, and what colors? Rigged what way? What size was the bait in the area? Were you getting hits on them but no fish on, or just no hits at all?

If you want to use bait but still want to get your gear back in the water quickly, I also have a suggestion. First off, rig all your herring leaders with a little barrel swivel on the end that attaches to your main line. Then get a dowel or broken fishing rod, or something similar, and put a snap swivel on the end of it.
While you've got two rods in the water fishing, take the next leader you're going to use, and rig a herring on it, then clip it to the end of your dowel and stick it in the water by the side of the boat to see its action, and adjust it to get proper action. Once it's tuned, just leave it sitting back in your bait cooler. When one of your baits gets ruined, just unclip the leader on that line and clip your pre-tuned herring on there, and you're ready to go pretty quickly, then just repeat. If the action is fast & furious, you might need to pre-tune a few at a time. You can cut some small pieces of drinking straws (3" long?) and coil your leaders, then pinch the line and stuff it into the straw, (so in the end it looks like a little bowtie) this keeps them from all getting tangled while they're in your cooler.

Hope this helps.

-N.