There is so much more to jig heads than I realised, I am still finding stuff out about them that I didn’t know
I think I need to do a series of audio style blog posts on here (podcasts?) which detail some specific moments or people or events in my saltwater lure fishing journey as such, mainly because if they are interesting to me then I would hope they might prove interesting to a few of you. There are definitely a bunch of distinct things which really stick in my mind with this whole lure fishing thing…………..
Probably one of the first few times I rigged a MegaBass X-Layer on a jig head
You have read this before, but one of them was I believe in October 2007 in south east Ireland when this local lad rocked up and proceeded to catch three good bass in a row on these soft plastics I had never seen before - MegaBass XLayer - rigged on a jig head. I hadn’t realised that those all in one Storm lures I had been using for pollack were actually paddletails pre-rigged on jig heads - I didn’t know what a “jig head” was - and I had no idea you could actually buy jig heads on their own to work with different soft plastics. Mainly because I didn’t have any idea how I could go about using them for my growing obsession with trying to catch bass on lures.
Back in the day…………….
Fast forward nearly twenty years and whilst I use different jig heads a lot for my bass fishing, I still feel like I have so much more to learn about the whole jig head thing and how versatile they can be. I like to think I know what I might refer to as my strengths and weaknesses in lure fishing, and one of them has tended to be somewhat shying away from an exposed J-hook style of jig head when there is a lot of shallower and snaggy ground involved. I don’t mind losing a lure or two I might add, but I know I turn to the whole belly-weighted weedless hook thing way more than I turn to a jig head. J-hook or weedless I might add.
Which might in turn be as a result of the sort of ground so many of us fish for bass a lot of the time - shallow, rough as hell, loads of weed, rocks, boulders etc. - but I know it is also down to how the belly-weighted weedless hooks work and make sense to me. For sure I feel very confident bumping lures like the Savage Gear Sandeel V2 Weedless and Savage Minnow Weedless around over rough ground, and these of course are essentially paddletails pre-rigged on jig heads. I do use the weedless versions of these specific lures more than I use the J-hook versions. I don’t worry about hookup ratios with weedless versus J-hook I might add.
But when I play around with say swimming different paddletails on different jig heads, I notice how some paddletails might roll a bit more - the Slender Scoop Shad for example - when you put the weight at the front instead of under the belly. I can’t categorically say that this in turn produces more fish because I think the Slender Scoop Shad is frigging lethal anyway, but from my own experiences I have a quiet hunch that more roll on this lure does indeed help a bit. I really like it cheb-rigged, but of course a jig head is a touch easier and less fiddly to rig up.
The Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug 10cm (deadly lure for wrasse, thanks Michael for alerting me to it!)
And then I start playing around with a few different creature bait presentations, because as good as the (not cheap) MegaBass Sleeper Craw obviously is, there are surely different ways to do this. Does your lure have to be a creature bait for starters? Could it just as effectively be a smaller paddletail or the MegaBass XLayer, the smaller 120mm Savage Gear Gravity Stick Pintail, or something really interesting like the (TPE floating-type soft plastic) Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug 8.8cm or 10cm which has a little inbuilt rattle and sits bolt-upright on the right jig head? How about the numerous Z-Man creature baits and numerous other lures which are all made from the floating TPE soft plastic? Again, on the right jig heads these things all naturally sit upright which in my limited experience I like to think is very appealing to a bass which is feeding head-down.
But what’s the right jig head or jig heads for this? I told you the other day about my regrets that I have zero background in freshwater lure fishing, and my research so far has led me down the Ned-rigging route which comes I believe from freshwater bass fishing in the US and Japan, and in turn has bled into the European perch and zander lure fishing scene. Go looking around the Ned world and the amount of different jig heads is mindboggling for an older saltwater lure angler like me who back in the day didn’t even realise that you could buy jig heads separately!
I have a long way to go down this particular road, but already I am finding that a true Ned-style jig head like you see above - the Westin Offset Ned Jig Head Tungsten 1/0 7g - at a bit of range seems a touch less easy to trundle along a mixed bottom (weed, mud, sand, gravel, small rocks etc.) than the Westin Swimming Jig Head 3/0 10g below which is rigged with that Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug 10cm below. Very early days and of course fishing perhaps more vertically in freshwater for perch and zander with this type of gear is a bit different to how I am trying to press it into service, but every day is a learning day with this bass fishing stuff, and I bloody love it. The more I incorporate different types of jig heads into my bass fishing, the more I find a few gaps as well, in that I want something specific which doesn’t actually exist. All good fuel to keep me waking up nice and early!
The Westin Swimming Jig Head 3/0 10g rigged with the Savage Gear Ned Dragontail Slug 10cm
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