After last month’s “Urchinmania” column, the texts from a couple of longtime pals got to be excruciating. Not in an annoying sort of way, but I got tired of even thinking about those spiky balls of soft plastic that have taken the bass world by storm.
“How do you rig them?” “What hook do you use?” “How do you store them?” “Can I just pack ‘em tight in a Ziplock bag or do I have to store them in the original container?” “Here’s a link to a YouTube video with famous bass pro Justin Lucas and how he fishes it; watch it and tell me what you think.” “Do you prefer the 17 mm size or the 24 mm size?”
I’d only been on the water fishing these sensational new baits twice. I’d caught six largemouth bass and missed lots of bites. Plus, as an American, I don’t really know what a millimeter is. I was far from an urchin expert, but I did my best to answer the questions.
I’d spent more than two hundred dollars on different kinds of urchins, a new medium-heavy spinning rod to cast them and different storage methods. I’d bought nail weights to properly rig them, and some split rings to attach weights to the hook. I’d even bought 500 tiny hair bands for $1.50 at a dollar store, to better position a treble hook amidst the spikes.
Finally, after a long text exchange with a good friend in Minnesota (who revealed he’d spent $191.47 “on those damn things” for 10 urchins, center pin spring screws and treble hooks for rigging them), I’d had enough.
“I’m just fishing a rubber skirt jig the rest of the year,” I texted him. “Urchins have just given me way too much to think about.”
I kind of meant it. The next time I launched my kayak, I still had one of the Frankenstein Da Fuzz urchin baits tied on, but I missed three fish with it. I also had two traditional jigs tied on and wrangled 11 bass on them. The first jig was a ¼-ounce, white Strike King Bitsy Bug jig with a Zoom Swimming Fluke trailer, which I swam in the muddy water of the southern Michigan lake; the other, which caught my biggest largemouth of the day, was a 3/8-ounce, green pumpkin jig from Red Oak Jigs in Florida (check out Red Oak Jigs on Facebook). I had adorned it with a shortened Strike King Rage Craw trailer in the “blue craw” pattern.
The classic lead head jig with a rubber skirt and soft plastic trailer had returned me to bass sanity. Few bass lures are as basic, inexpensive and reliable.
“Jigs work all year, from early spring till winter,” remarked my friend Steven Galloway of South Lyon. He’s an excellent kayak angler and we’d met up at one of his favorite lakes just north of Lansing to try and catch a big largemouth and take photos for this story.
We got on the state game area lake just before 5 p.m. and worked the edge of tall, thick lily pads in 5-foot depths. Steven had recently caught five bass that totaled 100 inches here, so the possibility of a big one was real. The wind consistently pushed my kayak right into the pads and pitched the jig just 8 to 10 feet on the edge. As the 3/8-ounce Red Oak jig still tied on from the previous day plummeted to the bottom, the croak yodeling of sandhill cranes distracted me. I’d lost focus, but my 20-pound test fluorocarbon zipping under my kayak brought it back. I applied an extremely lame hookset on slack line. The fish somehow got attached and pulled hard.
When it came to the surface through the stained water, it looked like an alligator. Big bass fever set in and I put slack in the line, reaching for my net. The leviathan came unpinned at the edge of the net’s hoop and disappeared. When you catch mostly dinky bass as I do, any bass of 18 inches or better looks like a sea monster, but this was easily the biggest bass I’d hooked all year. Despite the adrenaline-fueled disappointment, I was glad to be back fishing a jig.
Rubber skirt jigs have their roots in the early 1960s when Bob Carnes in Arkansas designed a mold that put the eyelet in the nose of a spade-shaped head. Melted tire weights provided the lead and he tied strands of rubber cut from a woman’s girdle to create the skirt. Fiber weed guards soon followed and this new jig design caught lots of fish. Carnes created the Arkie Lure Company and his jig design became known as the Arkie head. It was widely copied and Arkie style heads are still the most popular head shape in the world of bass jigs.
Silicone has mostly replaced rubber as a skirt material, although some serious bass heads insist on tying their own skirts out of rubber strands. These are still available at lure parts companies such as Barlow’s Tackle (barlowstackle.com). Rubber is finer and billows more.
Most bass anglers assume skirted jigs mimic crawfish, and they certainly can, but they can also be set up to mimic baitfish. That’s what my all-white Bitsy Bug/Swimming Fluke presentation was meant to imitate as I threw it on 15-pound test fluorocarbon and swam it over and through patches of weeds.
The green pumpkin Red Oak jig with its Rage Craw definitely looked more like a crawfish than a fish, but in the murky water where I fished with Galloway, a bass down 5 feet probably had to find it by “feel” with its lateral line. The water swishing through the silicone skirt and the flapping claws created vibrations that the bass interpreted as something to eat. I did catch a nice 18.75-incher and Steven caught four bass on his black-and-blue ½-ounce jig with a black-and-blue flake Gambler Burner Craw as the trailer.
I’ve heard some of my kayak tournament buddies say they never got the hang of fishing a jig and therefore never throw one. They’re missing out. Although there are certainly some nuances to optimize a jig presentation, fishing one effectively is pretty easy. While they’re awesome baits for close-range flipping, they’re also great for casting. Like a Texas-rigged soft plastic, it seems like most bites come when the jig is headed for the bottom or right after it settles. However, unlike a Texas rig, lots of bites come as you drag or hop it on the retrieve. They also get bit if you slowly swim them back after a couple of hops.
Generally, heavy tackle, a medium-heavy or heavy action rod, 17- to 25-pound test line ensures good hook sets with the heavier gauge hooks many jigs incorporate. My jig pole is a 7-foot, 5-inch heavy action G. Loomis, the reel spooled with 20-pound fluorocarbon. For swimming a smaller jig, I use a 7-foot medium-heavy G. Loomis and 15-pound fluoro.
Back when I got serious about bass fishing and competed in fun club tournaments a few decades ago, a jig was tied on one of my rods 100 percent of the time. With the advent of drop-shotting, Ned rigs and other must-try techniques, that jig rod fell out of the rotation. And even after I figure out how to best rig and fish an expensive urchin lure, you can bet a jig rod will be in the starting lineup of the bass arsenal.
