Here is a great explanation on how a slide works once you have hooked up trolling and located a school (hopefully a big school lol).
From the ifish forum
"As others have mentioned, including Del, once you hook a fish on the troll, you have a decision to make.
You either stay committed to the troll, or you commit to bringing as much of the school of fish up as you can and hitting the fish with iron, swimbaits and live bait. Its your choice really, but you usually have to go all-in either way to be really successful (unless the fish are so hungry it doesn't matter what you do).
If you like to run a really tasty troll spread of 6-7 lines or more, and you want to convert to fishing live bait, swimbaits and iron on a stop, you will learn quickly that running that many troll lines is a pain in the arse to clear once a fish is hooked (even moreso if there is much wind). If you can find the fish with 2-3 troll lines, maybe 4, then its much easier to convert to light tackle fishing because most of the time it takes considerable effort to chum and get iron, bait and swimbaits out on the slide and hook up more and more fish (while ignoring the troll spread, which by that time is getting more difficult to clear).
I come off the throttle the moment the first fish is hooked, and the crew runs for the cockpit to throw chum, livies, iron and swimbaits at the fish. If you do this fast, and the fish are willing, all those hungry eyes looking up at you from the depths will have something to eat....bendo x6.
If you are slow at this, or you screw around with the troll gear and don't get enough iron, bait and swimbait rods fishing, you have missed your opportunity.
Think of it from the fishes perspective. They are down there a few fathoms, and they see this bait ball coming (boat) with stragglers behind (troll gear). A few of them come up to eat, but there is not enough for more than just a few to eat. When you throw chum, swimbaits, iron and livies in, it brings up the school (if they wanna eat). Now you have raised a feeding school, and you can feed them as long as they will stay up.
This is the way I prefer to fish, even when the fish are eating squid early in the year.
There are lots of details in this framework, and each boat does it differently, but this is the general idea.
Have fun and experiment. Repeat what works and change tactics to conform with the conditions on the water. "
Swim baits and a chunking system is next on my list as I think I have enough trolling gear now. I'm going to use up some old bait and cut it up into 3/4" squares and put it in some small icecream buckets or something like that and keep it in the cooler.