How do you fish with a jig?

Jigs can be fiahed in two ways. 1. Jigs can be fiahed in heavy cover. Attach a trailer ( I prefer Strike King's Rage chunks) flip it or pitch it into the cover and slowly bounce it off the bottom towards the boat or shore depending how you fsih. You will feel a tick the strikes are very suttle. Jigs are uselly a big fish bait.

2. Then there are the swimming type jigs. These jigs are fished by casting them out and reeling them slowly back towards you. This method works well on suspended fish.

Harry

HI bassfisher. What type of waters are you planning to fish? I would like to add to basbandits comments and mention fishing jigs along rocky shoreline. Alot of the bass lakes in my area consist mostly of rocky shoreline. If I am in a boat I will cast to shore along a shoreline with boulders or rip rap. I will let the Jig sit for a few seconds on bottom and then pop it foreward a couple of feet at a time with pauses in between hops. This works good with crawfish imitating baits and I really enjoy working a tube jig this way. You can also do this from shore. Give some of these methods a try and experiment with retieve speed and hop distance to see what works in your area best. This is just a small piece in the overall puzzle. other methods may work better in other situations. Thats whats great about this forum. there is awealth of information.

Brian

man i use a jig every way ya can think of to fish them.....swim them with a curly tail grub, hope them like brain says-- dress them with anything under the sun including live bait, such as minnows, leaches, part of a crawler even crawdad tails--- you can add a safty pin spinner on it and make yer own beatle spin per say, change up the size of spinner or the color to suit your needs. plus you can change the body's that you place on the hook from size, colors, shapes so on and so forth.

in the river i'll use a jig that is lite enough to be pushed along in the current just off the bottom tip with either a minnow, grub, er a leach and i haven't been doing to bad on the smallies, even picking up a few walleyes this way too.

Good Morning NAFC Family!  Like so many have already said:  "There is no limit with how you can use a jig!"  Not only how but when.  The first thing you have to establish is: "what is a jig?"  Many think of a prefabricated jig in terms of a weighted head and hook garnished with skirt either in weedless or not version.  These can be purchased at most any tackle store and come in all shapes and sizes.  Often, a trailer of some kind or color is added to enhance jig for different reasons.  The other concept of a jig is a simple weighted head (occasionally in some conditions even a floating head may be used) and hook which you yourself may assemble to meet the needs of the moment.  For instance you may use a 1/64, 1/32, 1/16, 1/8 oz. for pan fish.  Typically the size of the hook is adjusted with the weight. Usually, 1/8, 3/16, 1/4, 5/16, 3/8, 1/2 and heavier are used for larger fish and again the size of the hook is adjusted with the weight and species of fish you are searching for.  These weighted jigs are fished with grubs, curly tails, tubes, and recently are being used with unlimited variations of plastics.  Some even enjoy decorating them with live bait while others use cut bait & scents.  One of my favorite applications is to decorate them with buck tails, feathers, & foil.  I try every year to get together a group of  kids and teach them how to build jigs and lures from their environment.  Amazing all the things laying around you can build a jig or lure out of.  All of which may be used for freshwater, brackish water, or saltwater both inshore and off shore.  The application of them to various species and the how to is only limited to your previous experiences or imagination.  I have enjoyed the company of several friends who like to build them and assume some of the ambiance of  fly fisherman who give them their own names.  This is only a limited concept of jig fishing and there are others who can really open our eyes to the application.  Hopefully, they will share with us in future forums?  Good luck and good fishing!  Uncle Tom

I have found an awesome jig trailer. If you have an asian supermarket near you, buy some frozen squid. Remove the head with tentacles and use it as your trailer. Incredible action!! Use the squid bodies cut up as channel cat bait. I caught my largest channel last February on squid.

Most jig bites surely come when it is falling toward bottom. Keep the line taut, not too tight, after it hits the water until the line goes slack indicating it is on bottom. While it is free-falling there ought not be any sensation up the line, so any feeling at all ought to be a bite, or it i****ting something like a branch of a submerged tree. React instantly. Once the jig is on bottom wait a few seconds for any bass in the area to investigate. Then, like a true crayfish feeling threatened, hop it a few feet off bottom and look again for a bite while it falls back.

Always dress a jig up with some sort of trailer on the hook, as noted live bait, or some pork rind, or plastic lure. To make the jig take more time falling add more bulk to the trailer, maybe a skirt with more strands, and/or a fat leggy plastic lure. The more legs the slower it falls, giving more time for bass to attack on the fall. Using salt free plastic gives even more time.

If wanting to keep a jig on bottom but having a plastic bait with some buoyancy, use air-impregnated or fat/oil impregnated plastic baits. I use River Bottom Getsum critters a lot, the plastic tending to float with tail up like the critter is feeding on bottom. It takes longer to fall, and is enticing to fish.

Jim

Some truly excellent info in this topic.

I'm not much of a jig fisherman....even though I probably have 1500 of them

That said....I will add to something Tom stated about jig weights...and marry that to what Jim said about trailers.

Hook size CAN make a difference in a jig...and it can affect the drop rate of the jig / trailer combination.

For example...let's say you have 2 jigs.....both with 1/8 th oz of lead. One has a size 6 hook (small)....the other has a size 2/0 hook worm hook.

The larger size hook would allow you to to use a larger chunk of plastic. And many plastics have some bouyancy to them...so a larger one sometimes can sink slower that a smaller one...as it displaces more water.

Styles of hooks ALSO can affect what applications you can use a certain jig for.....and shape of the head makes a difference too. 

Last but not least....sometimes companies will market jigs with a resin head on them...which make them considerably lighter in relation to a same physical size lead head.

I was able to pick up a bunch of these on closeout from Cabela's a few years ago. STILL haven't tried them yet....but this topic reminded me that it was and still is something I'd like to do.

That reminds me to look around for a small collection of old unfished jigs. They might have burned in our big fire in 1982, but maybe I had them on a wall in the house. Anyway, back then there were a lot more local crafts for sale in tourist trap shops here, including bass jigs possibly made from wood, turquoise, and some probably of limestone, all very "Native American" in style with feathers instead of fur. They were hand carved and painted, some very elaborately, crafted way before their time. They were too "pretty" to fish them, like many are today. I believe a hole was drilled through for a hook shank wrapped in a thin wood shank, so the hook likely would tighten up when wet. I figure they might be/become valuable if other folks remember them and want some.

I mention this because I like to look for "different" especially in jigs.

Jim