I don't fish the big waters much but once I was with a friend who has a big boat and we were fishing Columbia and we were not catching anything except a buzz. He was using herrings and forcing (strongly encouraging) me to use it as well. I finally got bored and put a #5 vibrax? spinner (orange body) and added some weight 5 ft above the spinner to get it down and nailed a nice fish ... then another one. That day the spinners worked for me.