Bushy on Lures
While Bushy admits he might be the last fisho around to jump on the jigging bandwagon, he’s sure glad he finally did!
I GENERALLY hate it when any kind of evangelist tries to jam something they have just discovered down my throat. I think I am immune to door-to-door religion and I’ve become quite adept over the years at politely fobbing off fanatical exponents of extreme forms of fishing. I’m sure you know the types I mean – they sort of sneak up on you and before you know it they are espousing the virtues of fishing exclusively for the double finned Icelandic tree herring, which only spawns every 15 years in the tops of pine trees after a monumental flood. Of course nothing else in the piscatorial world pulls as hard or is as difficult to fool with a lure. “Maaate, you should go straight to the little man who lives in the Funaki forest and makes the very best tree herring rods out of fan fan grass.” Yeah, right – I’m ringing the travel agent shortly.
I might have gone a bit mad there, but I am just preparing you for the fact that I am now a born again jigger and I’m pretty excited about it.
I think I might be the last person on the planet to have come on board but I reckon I must be an instant expert because now I have caught a few average sized kingies on jigs and I love it.
Up until know I must admit that I just didn’t get the jigging “thing” – probably because in a previous life I worked on a pro boat that occasionally jigged kings to make a few extra bucks when the weather was too bad on the shelf to go drop lining. I know we were pretty bad at catching kingfish but I do remember that jigging was really hard work both in continuously working the jigs and in fighting enough fish to try and make a buck.
The current jigging craze has been going for a long time now but I just kept thinking these blokes must be nuts to want to work that hard for fun. Whenever anyone suggested a jigging trip I told them the tree herring were on that week and I couldn’t make it.
The penny started to drop when one of my young mates pulled out a modern jigging outfit complete with an erratic all dancing, all singing butterfly type jig and showed me how this modern jigging thing works. It looked pretty easy and instantly I could see things had changed big time.
For a start the gear was just light years ahead of the stuff I used to use. I’ve had the pleasure of using some fantastic gear over the past few years but the reels I now have are probably the best I’ve ever seen. Actually, that isn’t quite correct – they are definitely the best reels of any kind I’ve ever used, bar none. It’s pretty neat to use a reel that has been designed from scratch to fish braided line. These new reels weigh nothing at all, they hold a bunch of line, and the drag pressures they can continuously exert are just fierce. The design and materials used ensure that these reels are not only light but just about bulletproof. They are not just jigging reels either, they will cast and troll and they are great for livebaiting as well. I have two reels and the bigger two-speed one is still light as a feather but it holds enough line and is capable of drag pressures that would have no trouble with big blue marlin. Without a doubt these reels are a paradigm shift in tackle.
Modern jigging rods are also diabolically effective – something with a bit of lift and flex gets the best out of a modern jig and it does so without a lot of effort on the part of the angler. This is the part I really like and I guess it is the part I least understood before seeing the light. Modern jigs do as much work on the drop as on the jerk – or should that be lift. All of a sudden the boatloads of small Japanese people wielding long flexible rods, jigs and sporting huge smiles started to make sense. These guys were not masochistic, crazy anglers just filling in time in the tree herring off season – they were catching lots of large fish with a lot less effort than I would have ever believed. Lift up the rod and the butterfly jig flies up in a weird looking erratic dart, and then watch on the drop as the thing does more moves than a pole dancer with St Vitus Dance. Repeat until the line goes tight. Easy.
As soon as I pulled my own new fangled jigging gear out of the boxes and wound on about a kilometre of 65-pound braid I was hooked. I even bought (with my very own money) one of those trendy roll-up-all-your-jigs type baggy things so I can look the part and everything!
My boat is not the biggest at the wharf and I really didn’t intend to drive it miles down the coast in search of kingies, but the addition of a radio caused just enough swelling of the cojones to enable me to do the 15 miles or so to the Green Cape kingy grounds. When I got there I really knew I was the last one on the jigging bandwagon because there were boats that would have fitted inside my 15-footer down there jerking the heavy metal around and everybody was having a ball.
Okay, I’m only holding on to the back of the jigging bandwagon because the last fisho in Australia has already boarded, but, man, am I having some fun and I think there might be a bit more to come yet.
