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To me the most important thing when fishing any lure is toe maintain contact and feel the lure. But it a jig or a plastic worm or a crank bait. You must be in contact with the lure at all times. That's critical when the bait is falling though through the water column and a fish inhales the bait. If you have slack in the line you won't even know that the fish has your bait. Sometimes the fish will swallow the bait or hook itself ( shape hooks really help here) but other time the fish will quickly realize that it's not a real food item and cough the bait out so fast that you never knew he took the bait. Fish in line with the wind so as to minimize the bow in your line created by the wind. If fishing deep use a heavier jig to maintain contact.
A very sensitive rod also helps a great deal. Get the best rod you can afford that has a high modulus and great feel. Be it a fast action tip rod or a slow action tip rod you need to feel the bit.
Keep your line taught the entire time or WATCH the line. You need a light thats easy to see and GOOD EYESIGHT. I wish I had more of the latter but I am old and slow these days. Younger eyes work best in this endeavor. But I hear that Lasik may help us old guys so there's still hope!
hehe
I like to fish small jigs VERTICALLY. By this I mean straight up and down under the boat using a 7ft long super sensitive rod. I use a loop knot on my fishing line and tie it about 18" above the tag end of my fishing line. I can attach a small 1/32 oz or a 1/16 oz jig to the line easily. I can do this with a Palomar knot too. Either way works. Then I attach a Bass Pro Shop Finesse lead jig to the tag end. I tie one overhand knot at the tag end to help keep the sinker from sliding off the end of the line. The finesse drop shot weights from Bass Pro Shop make adding new weights of different sizes and mass easy. You don't tie the weight onto the line you simply slip the line though the metal line holder on these special weights. Check out the BPS Master Fishing Catalog for 2008 and get you some of these weights.
Now you can let the weight down to the bottom and feel the bottom. Any fish that's hugging the bottom will have two jigs hanging over it's head. Use different size jigs and different types of jigs and colors. A tube jig filled with a small amount of cotton soaked in fish oil such as Cod Liver Oil or any of the attractant liquids on the market will do. I started out using Dr Juice as a fish attractant. That stuff helped me catch many more fish than I ever had before. I also went from fishing braided 20 lb test line with 400 Bomber Crank baits for largemouth bass, sauger, Catfish, Striper or White Bass and finally crappie. Bomber crank baits were easy to maintain contact with the entire time. You could tell immediately if some thing grabbed the hooks or if a stick or weed got fouled onto the crank bait's hooks. I learned to feel the baits at a very early age. Back then we use fiberglass rods and braided line routinely. And each bait was connected to the line with a snap swivel to make changing crank baits faster.
Did you know that you can take the back hook of a crank bait and then add a short leader with a small jig attached at one end and the crank bait to the other end of the leader. Fluorocarbon lines work well for this setup. A stiff line will keep the jig behind the crank bait. You can rig the jig weedless if you need to using a small rubber band. Put the rubber band in front of the hook loop and then attach it to the barb of the hook. This will help keep the end of the hook from fouling on things, yet let the fish bit down on the rubber band and get himself hooked.
Troll this setup behind the boat using 200 bandit series baits for water less than 6 ft and 300 series for water deeper than 10 ft. Let out about 150 to 175 ft of line and use side planers if you can. If not that's OK you can still catch fish. Getting the baits out to the side of the boat will let you use more rods though. Some states limit how many rods you can use so check the State regulations before going fishing.
Now vary the boat speed to control the depth of the baits. Check your depth finder and look for suspended fish. Often in the hot summer months the fish will suspend about 10 to 15 ft down and right above the thermocline during the middle parts of the day. They may be at the same level as a nearby shelf next to a drop off and suspend out away from the drop off by a 100 or more feet. They can easily move horizontally over to the top of the shelf to feed and then move back out over the river channel and over deep water afterward.
Trolling a crank bait right though the school and having a trailing jig can trigger some fish to bite out of instinct even if they are in a neutral mood.
This trick has been around for over 50 years. I first read about this in my Dad's Herter's Guide book when I was only 10 years old. But I have not used it more than once or twice for some reason. I normally can catch the fish by just tight lining a minnow or jig and searching the drop offs.
Finding the fish just got much easier these days with the invention of side scanning sonar for the masses. Humminbird has taken the lead in fishing finding electronics when they introduced the Humminbird Side Scanning Sonar units coupled with GPS maps. Now you can patrol a lake in grids and mark likely looking fishing spots on your GPS unit as Way points. Then return to fish these spots where you saw structure and fish. A hard bottom to soft bottom transition area is easy to see and mark with the side scanning sonar unit. Using SD memory cards you can take the cards to your computer and enter the data into your computer for later analysis.
Instead of seeing only a small circle of area under your boats old 2 D transducer you can now see a line out of both sides of the boat to 240 ft in either direction. Moving along at 4 to 5 mph you can map the entire lake bottom in a small lake in just a few hours. It's as if you emptied the lake of water and took pictures and then refilled the lake. Only the fish stayed in place in mid air and didn't sink to the bottom in the process. You get a snap shot of where the fish were. Now with the side scanning sonar you can't tell exactly how deep the fish are unless you pass right over the top of them and use the 2D transducer to find their depth. But that's no problem because with the side scanning unit you can get the fish's x and y map coordinates and motor over to the spot and use the 2d transducer to determine the exact dept that the fish are using. Now you have the XYZ map coordinates. Longitude, latitude and the depth to zero right in on the fish. You can lower your jig and be within a few inches of the fish's mouth if you do things right. LOL The poor fish don't have anyway of escaping unless they swim away fast when the detect the side scanning sonar sound. But I am not sure they can detect those 800 MHz sound waves or if they do they don't know what they are or what's coming. But they can look up and see the bottom of your boat silhouetted against the bright sunlit sky above. But you can fish right over the top of a school of crappie if the water is murky enough and you are quiet. And if the water's clear the fish will probably be suspended deeper anyway. They like to hide in the shadows where they can't be seen by their prey. Like other predators they like to ambush their prey so as to conserve precious energy. That's why they hide behind stumps in the shadows where they can't be seen by the shad out in the open sunlight water. Not until it's too late. LOL
You can also catch out a small jig on a ultra light open faced spinning reel with a ultra light rod. Using light flexible mono fishing line you can cast out a small jig a long ways. Let the jig sink on a line that's acting like a pendulum. The crappie if they are there will hit the jig on the fall. Keeping the line tight and in feeling the jig all they way to the bottom count down one thousand one, one thousand two, etc. Vary the depth as you fan cast around you. If the crappie are there they will let you know pretty quick. Sometimes they will be near the surface an other times they can be on the bottom. If there is a thermocline and it's in the hot summer months don't bother fishing below the thermocline. After the fall turnover the fish will again be able to use the lower levels of the lake. They can use this hypolimnium until next summer when the lake starts to stratify again and oxygen becomes depleted in the lake bottom waters.
You can also fish a jig with a floating jig head and rig it Carolina style.
The jig is a versatile bait and catches a lot of fish. Ask any walleye fisherman up north about how to use a jig to catch walleyes and he will tell you the same thing.
Re: Need some help on how to fish a jig.
Originally Posted by dsonthelake84
