Which downrigger actually puts your lure where the counter says?

A downrigger counter tracks how much cable has left the spool, counted from spool rotations, not the vertical depth of the weight or the lure. Once any blowback angle is present, cable out and true depth stop being the same number. True depth equals cable out multiplied by the cosine of the blowback angle, which is published trigonometry rather than a manufacturer estimate, and it requires reading the actual blowback angle to apply.

Trolling speed, current and the weight's own shape push the cable backward off straight down, an effect called blowback, and the counter has no way to detect that angle. A 30 degree blowback angle alone turns 100 feet of cable into about 87 feet of true depth, so the faster you troll and the lighter or rounder the weight, the more the counter overstates how deep the lure is actually running.

Both matter, and they interact. Trolling speed increases the drag pushing the weight backward, and weight shape determines how much that drag actually moves the weight for a given force. A pancake shaped weight tracks straighter and resists blowback more than a round cannonball at the identical weight and speed, which is why swapping shapes is often the cheaper fix compared with buying a heavier ball.

A manual rigger costs less and has nothing electrical to fail, which suits one rigger fished at a relaxed pace. An electric retrieve earns its price the moment you are running two or more riggers, or fishing deep water where cranking two hundred feet of cable back in by hand during a strike risks tangling every other line on the boat before the fish is landed.

Ten pounds is the standard inland weight most published blowback references are built around, and it holds a reasonable trolling speed with manageable blowback on typical lake conditions. Faster trolling, deeper water or stronger current all call for more weight to hold the same blowback angle, and a pancake shaped weight lets you hold a given speed with less blowback than a round ball of the same weight.

Switch to a heavier weight, switch to a pancake or fish shaped weight instead of a round ball, or accept the blowback and correct for it mathematically using the cable length and the measured angle. A heavier, more hydrodynamic weight is the physical fix. Reading the actual angle and calculating true depth is the fix that works regardless of what weight is already on the boat.