Casts well, swims well, bumps well, but is this style of rigging going to effectively hook fish?

I don’t know nearly enough about the huge variety of different jig heads out there and to be perfectly honest the bulk of my “soft plastic lure on a jig head” fishing ends up revolving around lures like the Fiiish Black Minnow, the Savage Gear Sandeel V2, and the Savage Minnow. Depending on the lure I can choose a J-hook or weedless design, and by hook or by crook (and Fiiish obviously has a far more extensive range of lure body sizes, jig head types, and jig head weights) I can usually get to the right combination of lure size and jig head to deal with the fishing situation in front of me. Damn right I like it when certain lures match up specifically to certain heads and hooks and so on……………

But there is a whole world of different jig heads to match to soft plastics out there, and as it often seems to be the case, a lot of the thinking and technology seems to come from the freshwater world, whether that be largemouth bass or our pike and perch and zander and so on. Take a brief look around the huge world of freshwater lure fishing and you will find a lot of anglers who seem to be very adept and comfortable at marrying soft plastics to different jig heads and fishing with them. Swimming, twitching, bumping, shaking, you name it and there seems to be a jig head designed to do it.

And then because of some specific work I am doing this end and also because a while ago I went and stumbled across a huge range of Savage Gear Ball Jig Heads in their catalogue which I didn’t even know about, I got to wondering whether I might improve my bass related options with some different jig heads. Please note that there are millions of different jig heads out there which all seem to be designed to do different things, indeed I guess I was put off a bit by such a simple ball-head design because surely you need so and so jig head shape to swim and so and so shape to bump and so on? I know that I will turn to the Savage Minnow or the Sandeel V2 Weedless depending on how I am fishing more than worrying so much about the actual body shape of the lure, but at the end of the day when you rig a paddletail on a ball shaped jig head and swim it back to you, well it looks pretty good to me. Same when you bump it along the bottom etc.

Now I am not about to dismiss all the amazing thinking and design work that goes into jig heads. I know how much work we did for example with the jig heads for the Savage Minnow and Sandeel V2 lures, indeed I have kept all the different iterations of jig head designs here at home because it really interests me where we started and where we ended up. The simple fact seems to be though that ball jig heads work pretty well in a bunch of different situations - okay, I knew that, I have fished with them a fair bit over the years - but because of my work with Savage Gear and then stumbling upon this massive range of their Ball Jig Heads, I was able to request a few to try (hooks from #6 to #10/0, weights from 3g to 30g, and that’s not including the other ranges of ned heads, swim heads, standup heads, rattling, micro etc.).

So I wanted to start playing with some of the Gravity Sticks on jig heads for starters, and then along came these Slender Scoop Shads the other day and I wanted to play around with different ways of rigging them as well. For sure I will turn to our rather good 6/0 weedless hooks whenever possible, but jig heads present different options, and you know how much I like having different options without having to carry much more or any more gear. I am not about to start trying to bump a J-hook/exposed hook style jig head over a snaggy reef (I turn to the Savage Minnow Weedless for this, that particular jig head is SO good for working along really rough ground), but I have done plenty of bumping jig heads along in fast current over the years just fine with a J-hook jig head, and whilst I did think I might end up snagging a load of them up and getting cross with it all, the experimenting I have done recently with swimming these Ball Jig Heads around over rough to broken ground has been really interesting.

The traditional way to rig a head like this is to carefully thread the soft plastic on much like you would a lugworm or defrosted sandeel. But if I am to play around a bit more with these things then I am also rather keen not to end up with a whole heap of pre-rigged soft plastics on Ball Jig Heads which then confuses the hell out of me with what to take out fishing and what to leave at home. I got myself into a bit of a mess with so many pre-rigged Gravity Sticks and DoLive Sticks but as per this blog post here I sorted myself out and my system works a treat. But can I take a few different jig heads with me as well and still utilise the same selection of (mainly) Gravity Sticks which I tend to take out fishing?

So there I was the other day starting to rig up a few Slender Scoop Shads onto these Ball Jig Heads I have here (I have got the 5/0 5g, 5/0 10g, 5/0 15g, and 5/0 20g here, but I have asked to see some of the 4/0 and 6/0 versions as well), and before I knew it I was wondering what lure I should put on what weight jig head and in no time at all I had steam coming out of my ears. But I then remembered a different way of rigging which a kind angler on Facebook showed me last year I think it was. Based around a jig head and a corkscrew/hitchhiker as you can see above, the end result is a very easy way of rigging up when you are actually out fishing, as per the photo below. It’s as easy as rigging a soft plastic on a weedless hook which is designed to work with a corkscrew……………….

But, and it’s a big but - a J-hook itself is not actually designed to work like this. A weedless/Texas/offset hook has been designed to work like this of course, in that there is sufficient room for the lure to be literally pushed far enough around the bend on the hook for the fish to get hooked up if that makes sense. Notice how there is far less room when you rig a J-hook like this, but of course it’s a far easier way to rig a soft plastic onto a J-hook jig head if like me you don’t want to have to carry a load more pre-rigged soft plastics. It’s interesting as well how when you get to a certain weight of jig head - depending on the lure of course - how well a lure can suddenly start casting.

Now I can’t actually say yet whether this way of rigging soft plastics ends up hooking as many fish as a proper weedless hook might, but I have heard from enough good anglers now who do fish like this to trust that it works great. I am also one of those anglers who is quite prepared to try different things and risk missing fish by doing so. I consider it an important part of my fishing education to keep trying different stuff in order to try and improve. I don’t really want to miss or lose fish, but how on earth am I going to prove to myself what works and doesn’t work unless I actually do it myself? Apologies if you have got to here and you’re wondering what on earth I am talking about!, but the whole soft plastics thing just keeps on becoming more and more important for my own fishing - and I know I can do more and more with these lures if I keep my eyes and ears open and continue to think and experiment………………….

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