Lightweight Jigging Offshore

[PlasticFantastic]

I'm booked in for a trip jigging this sunday on Seaprobe off the Gold Coast and am going to be jigging for Kingies using a 15kg Daiwa jig rod Certate 3500 HD and 15 kg braid. My mate who jigs regulary says the gear should be able to cope with a 10 kg fish okay but I wanted to know if any one else has jigged with light gear in deep water with any luck before.


Cheers

[DazSamFishing]

G day

I have given it ago without much success... You will find that a 10kg fish will dust you up in seconds on 15kg gear... I used 10kg gear once...

Also, depending on the current, you may need to use heavier jigs which also affects the rod, reel and line.

You will get some fish up... but the success rate wouldn't be too flash hot! I suppose it would depend on the size of fish you target on the day... It may also prove to be an expensive exercise, and I have even found that my 50 and 60lb outfits aren't adequate at times... I will now be using a super thin 90lb colour coded braid when I hit the wider grounds.

Let us know how you go!

Good luck

Daz

[PlasticFantastic]

I'm fairly confident about handling stuff up to about 10 kg on it using about 5-6kg of drag but its the bigger ones i'm worried about. As for the jigs the boat backs up into the current so about 200gm would be enough with the thinner line. Fingers crossed.

[banshee]

I'm with Daz,if your over cranky ground I think it's going to end in tears if there's anything over 6 or 7 kilo's interested.

[Fisher4life]

When asking my local tackle store about jigging, he said if using braid, have a very long leader of 90-100lb. however, with a good branded 15kg braid, solid leader and a heavily set drag, i shouldn't see any problems.

All my offshore fishing i only use 30lb braid on a TLD25, using a 10-15kg ugly stick. I am yet to have the braid snap and I have brought in some monsterous cod well over 30kg and some very big spanish (Not jigging tho) on this set up.

Give it a go, i would be very curious to see how you go. Just remember long heavy leader for a little bit of stretch and durability over the rough bottom!

Look forward to the report

[JustOneMore]

We have just got into the jigging scene this season and have lost a lot of jigs due to some big unstoppables. We use 100lb leader and have 20 and 34kg oufits rigged with braid and have been applying 10 and 15kg of drag pressure respectively.

We have been reefed too many times to count and lost some expensive jigs to boot. One thing you have to remember with jigging is that your usually fishing structure and they are hard to stop quickly once they are hooked and heading back to the structure. Good rush for 10 seconds then bang you've lost your jig. We seem to get the small ones to the boat but nothing over 6kg yet.

Give it a whirl and you will get some great tips from the experts.

[Duyz72]

Don't forget to post the pics of your success!

[finding_time]

Plasticfantastic


How are you going to stop the bigger fish chewing on your jig? It's alright to say you only want to catch little fish but how do you make this happen. I've got half a shed full of gear that i thought would have been up to the task and when proven it wasn't i then got the right stuff to handle the task, this is a very expensive way to fish. There is no worse feeling than LOOSING a good fish because of poor gear.

I think you will get fish to the boat with that gear you are using but i also think the probability of getting bricked is very high ,also there is a good chance that the other fisho's on the boat are going to hate you by the end of the day, reason:- with that light drag you will be using the fish is going to be swimming around alot in mid water and is going to swim around the lines of the other jiggers on the boat.,( i'm guessing between 7 and 10 anglers) after they have all had some very expensive braid cut of there reels there going to be looking at you :o With normal jigging gear 80lb braid and heavy drags 12+ drag you dont tend to have this problem.

Ian