jig combo

[rosco1974]

thanks deepfried i have bought the ones from outwide1,pick them up next weekend so that should get me started

[TimD]

I have been told by a mate that the price of some jigs is only to match the fishermans ego and gullibility

How right is this statement, expensive jigs = wank factor



You could use a $2 shifter from crazy clarks, like this bloke



cheers tim

[outta line]

the spin option is a bit easer to jig than overhead ......its a real work out and you wont need a gym membership after a while .....but when you get into the rhythm its gr8 fun .....i gave up on heavy jigging (300+grams) some days that is all they will hit and its hard work......i jig a lighter combo now saltiga 4500 on a monster mesh 63.. 80-150g....... i use my heavy jigs as weights now with no hooks on paternoster rigs... they work a treat as teasers....gave up on heavy jigs as lives do the work for you......but is always good to have another option when you are out there .......looks like mick has covered all bases with that lot well done.......enjoy...

[outta line]

How right is this statement, expensive jigs = wank factor



You could use a $2 shifter from crazy clarks, like this bloke



cheers tim

hey tim ...gr8 pic......where was that taken from ....my guess is SA arno bay where they will hit anything .....but hey if its looks different the only way to find out is to bite it.....unlucky snapper.......never know if you never try.....well done to him ...... think id stick to jigs but u never know when u might need the shifter onboard ...........cheers mick

[rosco1974]

will be wraped to get onto 1 fish i think,but i do like using livies for kings and aj's

[Coodgee]

will be wraped to get onto 1 fish i think,but i do like using livies for kings and aj's

yeah that is the same dilemma I will find myself in... sitting on top of a big show of kings, looking like a spastic seagull on amphetamines trying to get the mechanical jigging technique right. It's a hard call not to switch to the livies pretty quickly if you are not catching fish and everyone else is getting them on the livies. I'm not even sure it's going to be possible to jig while others have livies in the water is it? Might be a good recipe for tangles.

I've been watching a few videos. I think the main thing to look out for is to not raise the rod tip so high that you have more than one rotation of the handle worth of slack to wind up. I actually went down to breaky creek yesterday for a bit of practice off the jetty there. it's only about 10 metres deep but allowed me to get a few cranks in before the jig hit the surface.

[TimD]

hey tim ...gr8 pic......where was that taken from ....

Found it on google, not sure where it was caught


cheers tim

[deepfried]

yeah that is the same dilemma I will find myself in... sitting on top of a big show of kings, looking like a spastic seagull on amphetamines trying to get the mechanical jigging technique right. It's a hard call not to switch to the livies pretty quickly if you are not catching fish and everyone else is getting them on the livies. I'm not even sure it's going to be possible to jig while others have livies in the water is it? Might be a good recipe for tangles.

If we have livies and jigs we will generally jig first before dropping any livies. Once they see a live bait they can switch off the jigs quickly. Sometimes fish can switch off livies as well so if we have landed a couple on jigs then switch over to livies it can increase our numbers for the day.

[NAGG]

See how much outwide1 wants for that collection. There is a good variety of jigs and colours amongst them. Those zest super deeps work great but mo don't sell them anymore

The cheapies work just as well as the dear ones and some days I have been smashed by my mate using $10 cheapies and I am dropping $30++. I have been told by a mate that the price of some jigs is only to match the fishermans ego and gullibility ! They all work but I still have a mix of cheapies and my "nice" ones.

Plenty of the cheap jigs are soft & can be destroyed by a decent fish ........... otherwise !

for me .... have some cheapies but always carry better ones too
I'm trying to convince a mate from Sydney not to skimp on his jigs and poppers for when he comes up here to join me on a NQ safari

Chris

[Blindfreddy]

I have a few jigs bought over the years, but always grab the goto jig (never fail) when the others aren't producing the goods. Surecatch jigs for me. Each brand of jigs has their own flutter pattern. Find out what works for you then experiment with the colours.

Regards.

[Brent_P]

Rosco,

You've bought a great set of jigs there, I reckon. The pink, glow white, and chartreuse jig in the 5th pocket is a Daiwa Sacrifice Stick, one of the best jigs ever made in my opinion. I started using that particular jig and colour about five years ago, after I saw someone using one on a charter boat and it outfished other jigs 2 or 3 to 1. Since then, I've caught literally dozens of 8-15kg kingies off the Gold Coast on the 250g and 300g sizes, and some bigger fish at White Island, NZ, up to 21kg. That particular jig and colour seems to appeal to larger fish too - I've caught relatively few 'rats' on it (below 6kg) for some reason. They used to sell for around $28, but when I was told that Daiwa were not making them anymore, I asked someone if I could buy his for $50, but he wouldn't sell it. Later, I found another source.

The jigs in the 3rd and 4th pockets are Smith Nagamasa's (or maybe the Zest clones called "Metal Baitfish")- considered by many, both here and overseas, to be the best kingfish and amberjack jigs available. They sell here for $25-$30, but sell for half that overseas, of course.

Each year for the past six years, between August and the beginning of December, once every 1-2 weeks depending on weather, I jig from a charter boat off the Gold Coast for kingies and amberjacks. When you fish with a lot of different jig fishermen, over a long enough period of time, you get to see what works and what doesn't. Not all jigs are created equal. Sure, I might get a day or two in November, when the biggest fish have generally arrived, and when the fish are schooling in great numbers from 30 metres down to all the way to the bottom in 80 metres, and on these days you could drop down a gumboot and still draw a strike (but probably not as many strikes). I've seen a deckie catch a couple of 2kg kingies on a fluoro orange metal stanley knife with hooks attached, when the rats were really schooling up. But that doesn't mean that gumboots and stanley knives are as good as tried and proven jigs, whatever their cost. On the slower days, when you might jig for 4 or 5 hours for two 10kg fish, you'll be happy you tied on the right jig, or jigs. When the fish are more spread out and/or not actively feeding, the right jig might score you a strike or three, when no one else gets a hit. Competition within a large school of actively feeding fish can get you hits on anything that moves, but when the fish are swimming solo no such competition exists.

Jigging on these charters, very rarely do I get outfished by people exclusively fishing livebaits, whether they're using yakkas, slimies, or tailor. I jig mainly because it's very effective. Some days, particularly last year, the kingies don't seem to want to hit the livebaits at all. I don't think I've ever had a day when they would only hit livebaits and not jigs (unless we're talking about one isolated fish for the whole trip). One example from last year, was when I was jigging and the seven other customers were livebaiting (or maybe one or two were fishing dead-baits). From the flybridge, the skipper called that we were drifting through a really good show. I hooked and boated three 8kg kingfish in 15-20 minutes, while only one of the seven other customers hooked up. He lost his twenty metres down, if I remember right, and the school apparently dispersed.

I think the reason good jigs regularly outfish livebaits (at least here off the Gold Coast) is because fish are not always actively feeding. Once salmon leave the ocean and enter rivers to spawn, they stop feeding, but fishermen still catch them on chromed spinners in the rivers. I think jigs often draw a similar response from kingfish - a kind of instinctive "reaction bite" that has little to do with hunger. Jigs may also be visible from a greater distance than a little yakka livebait, lazily swimming in the current, at one fixed depth. So if your mates are getting plenty of hits on livebaits and you're getting none on a jig, you probably need to change your jig - or your jigging action.

In my opinion, one of the most important things to do before you start jigging for kingfish, is actually check your spinning reel's drag on dry land, so you know what 9-10kg of drag feels like. I believe most people are reefed because they were running less than 9kg of drag. I use a small lever drag reel for jigging, so I know exactly how much drag I run, because I set it with scales, and I haven't been reefed in years. The advantage of jigging over livebaiting is that you'll often hookup 30-40 metres off the bottom, which gives you plenty of time to stop the fish reaching the bottom, if you're running enough drag. Another important thing, which few people can be bothered doing, is testing the actual breaking strain of your joining knots. It's pretty risky running 10kg of drag if your knots will only hold 12kg, especially since drag pressure increases as spool diameter decreases, as is the case when your jig is near the bottom in 80 metres of water.

Last year I decided to try more 'slider' type jigs, which are popular in Asia and the US. One day the previous year, we'd had a day like I mentioned earlier, when the fish were big, schooling up in huge numbers, and spread through almost the entire water column. Although the Daiwa Sacrifice Stick caught many of the biggest fish, it didn't draw as many hits as the longer thinner Japanese jigs, which were also hooking fish halfway down on the drop. During that trip, I couldn't have actually handled any more fish, but I knew these sliding jigs would suit my jigging style better. I don't do the normal 'mechanical' jigging style, as I couldn't really get the rhthym right with an overhead, but I wasn't regularly getting outfished by people using that style, so I saw no reason to change. I do a kind of sped-up pump and wind - one sharp lift, two winds down (depending on the reel retrieve rate), dropping the rod on the wind-down at about the same rate as the jig is dropping back. This technique has worked very well for me, but doesn't look as cool as the 'proper' mechanical jigging style . This is actually how you're meant to fish slider jigs - as tension comes off the line, the slider jig slides sideways instead of down, reflecting any available light as it flutters. Anyway, I did a lot of internet 'research' and one of the slider jigs I bought turned out to be the best jig I've tried (other than the Daiwa, maybe) - a 240g Shout Slide Actor. I bought these jigs from Asia and the US for around $30. They are not available in Australia, probably because there is a limited market for $60 jigs, though you can buy Hots Keitans for $60 in Australia if you want (or pay $20 elsewhere, like I did). By the way, the Hots Keitans were the jigs used by several people on that trip I mentioned, the jigs that were being hit halfway down.

I've heard a few good reports about the cheap Surecatch jigs now, even a report on 360Tuna about the same jig with a different name, but I've never seen one in action. But, Rosco, you probably don't have to buy any new jigs for a while now... Good luck with your jigging.

Sorry about the epic post, but hopefully you'll find some of this information useful. I've been putting off posting on this thread for days now, with good reason...

Cheers,
Brent.

[Coodgee]

Brent, that is a wealth of knowledge, thankyou. I went out with a charter yesterday. We saw some good shows of what was presumably quite a large school of kings in about 100 metres of water. We tried jigging them first. I was using a williamson 250gram knife jig. In a hundred metres I found it quite hard to do the mechanical action with any speed, just because the jig was so heavy to move through that much water. I could only keep it up for about 10 drops before I gave in and tried the livies. we had Yakkas and slimeys but they weren't interested in either. Even tried a plastic for no result.

Would you recommend trying different jigs in this situation?

also, I'm quite interested in you jigging technique because I am either not strong enough or too uncoordinated to use the mechanical jigging technique with any finesse. Are there any videos online of your technique?

[rosco1974]

awsome post there brent,thanks heaps .hope to give this type of fising a real crack this year.hope to post a few good size kings and aj's

[Brent_P]

Coodgee,

The Williamson Benthos jigs are almost exact copies of the Daiwa Sacrifice Sticks, and seem to be reasonably productive. The Daiwa jigs I use though are more successful, I believe, in the particular colour scheme of luminescent white, fluorescent yellow, and fluorescent pink. Fluorescent coloured jigs can be very effective, due to the way colours are filtered out at depth. The red end of the spectrum appears to turn grey first as depth increases, followed in order by the other colours in the spectrum. Fluorescent colours are different, though, in that those pigments actually change the wavelength of the available light to that of the colour you see, which is why fluorescent colours appear so bright, and should appear much brighter than other colours at depth. And of course luminescent pigments glow in the dark. Having said that, full lumo jigs with no shine or fluoro colours do seem to be less effective than many other jigs for some reason, from what I've seen.

Anyway, the Williamson Benthos isn't quite as tapered as the Daiwa at the nose, which does seem to make it 'heavier' to jig due to greater water resistance. The easiest to jig are the long streamlined jigs with very thin noses, like Shout Slide Actors, Hots Keitans, Mangrove Studio Wipeout Slides, FCL Labo VN230's, Smiths Nagamasas (to a lesser degree), and probably the Downrigger jigs, by the look of them. The River2Sea Turkey Slider jigs have very minimal resistance when jigged and look great, but I've only seen them catch smaller fish - there may be differences in success rate from location to location, though.

I tried to find a Youtube clip from the free DVD that came with 'Fishing World' magazine a few months ago, called 'Norfolk Island Kings' I think, because I remember the presenter was using a similar jigging technique to mine. Instead, I found another video about Norfolk Island jigging. At 1:04 the guy in the green shirt is using a similar style, but not lifting quite as high as I do, and at 3:52 the guy in the red shirt is doing something similar, only slower with an extra wind (I also jig with my rod gimbal in a gimbal belt, which makes fishing with an overhead much easier). You'll probably find jigging something like this much less of a struggle. I have to say that my jigging style requires no skill and very little coordination - and I can't say that any kind of heavy jigging requires any 'finesse'! 'Stamina' and 'brute force', yes, but 'finesse'? No...

Here's the youtube clip. Unlike this guy, I don't drop my jig all the way to the bottom. If you're using multi-coloured braid, just flip the bail when you're 5-10 metres off it. There's no point risking snagging up, and you really don't want to hookup 2 metres off the reef if you can avoid it, anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w6hR...eature=related

Cheers,
Brent.

[Coodgee]

brent, thanks very much for replying. that is a very informative post! I reckon I might give that technique a go. a fast pump-and-wind is a good way to describe it. I will have to look at getting some of those jigs.

when yo usay fluro, that is obviously different from the reflective material? I have a cuttlefish jig (forget the brand) which is the glow-in-the-dark colour on one side and pink on the other side, but the pink is more reflective like a bicycle reflector.

There is no better way to learn than to watch someone who is good at it, when are you going on a charter next? I don't own a boat so mostly do charters as well, usually with Smithy out of Maloolaba. If you're interested we should organise a booking - your guy or mine - and we can go and jig somes Kings. Only if you are interested of course! I'm always struggling to find other people to book the charter with. Smithy takes max 4. who do you normally charter with?