Fishing with Jigs
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By Ted Takasaki and Scott Richardson
In its essence, the jig is one of the oldest and most effective fish catching lures out there.
A jig’s purpose is to have enough weight to take the bait down into the strike zone when fish are on or close to the bottom and relatively concentrated on structure.
The ultra-short distance between weight and bait allows preciseness in presentation you can’t get with the weight, leader and hook of the Lindy rig.
Jigs are versatile. Many of the truly great anglers you can name would choose a jig if they could use just one presentation for the rest of their lives. Jigs are good for fishing from the shoreline to deep water. They can be used on farm ponds, lakes, rivers and reservoirs. They catch everything from bluegills, crappies and perch to walleyes, smallmouth bass and northern pike. They can be cast and brought back to the boat with a variety of retrieves, from an aggressive snap-and-drop to dragging one on the bottom at a snail’s pace. Some days it seems you can catch walleyes by trolling a spark plug with hooks, but most days their mood is neutral to negative. You’ve got to entice them to bite. On those days, a jig is your best bet more often than not.
Style says it all
Nine times out of 10, a simple ball jig like a Lindy Fuzzy-E-Grub will do the trick. The round head works well on soft muck bottoms like you find in a river or hard bottoms of sand, gravel and rock.
They cut through current well enough to reach the bottom where most fish live. The bigger, river-oriented jigs are flatter to make them more hydrodynamic in order to slice through moving water.
You can cover the water column by choosing the right weight, from an eighth-ounce for the shallows, to three-eighths, five-eighths or an ounce for deep water and heavy current. Overall sales figures bear out the fact jigs weighing one-quarter of an ounce are the most used because they work well in that fish-producing zone from 10 to 20 feet. The key to successful jigging is to use enough weight to stay on the bottom.
One-sixteenth of an ounce balances well with slip-bobber rigs for working the top of windy reefs or still-fishing feeding flats at night. The lesson learned here is you should have a variety of sizes of ball-style jigs in the tackle box.
Remember all those articles you read about using pliers to bend the hook out slightly to open the gap in order to improve hooksets? Lindy designers pondered why we were bombarded with requests from angler/consumers to make one for them. The result is the new MAX GAP jigs with a 10-percent wider gap than regular jigs. The key to hooking fish is the gap between the hook point and the eyelet - the bigger the gap, the higher the fish catching percentage.
MAX GAP jigs also take advantage of another design change learned through trial and error. In the past, most light jigs were made with small hooks. But with the MAX GAP jigs, even the one-sixteenth ounce jig sports a 1/0 wide bite hook to improve fish-grabbing and fish-holding power. Heavier jig sizes have 2/0 hooks to better accommodate live bait and plastic trailers.
Our experience with jig design over the years has brought two other improvements to the MAX GAP jigs. First, they’re available with rattles for dingy water and low-light conditions. For another, they come with hooks in Bleeding-Bait red, a bite-enticing color which walleyes really seem to like. Add in Techni-Glo colored heads and you’ve got a fish attracting, fish hooking, multi-purpose tool.
Specialty jigs have special purposes. It was only a couple of years ago that Lindy introduced the NO-SNAGG Timb’r Rock Jig, which was the design of Northwood’s walleye guide, Greg Bohn. With a 7-strand wire snag guard that allows you to fish in the thickest brush, the NO-SNAGG jigs gets you to where the big fish live without snagging, scaring off the fish and forcing you to break off the jig and lose precious time retying.
Bohn also designed the NO-SNAGG Veg-E-Jig, which has the eye toward the front, a streamlined body, and the wire hook guard to guide the jig through weeds.
Pick the right style then experiment with action, color and rattles. Try scent. Add a plastic trailer like Lindy’s new Munchies Thumpin’ Grub. The Munchies Thumpin’ Grub has been designed with a unique swirl-type triple tail that pulsates and throbs even with a slow retrieve.
Have different people use different combinations of all of the variables until you hit on the one that works. Let the fish tell you what they want. When someone gets the first fish, analyze what worked and then repeat it.
Remember, too, that conditions like water clarity, sunlight, wind and other factors can change throughout the day and effect fish behavior. If one combination of jig color and action stops working, make a change.
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