When you’re first learning the fishery for a given area, you look around and see what the local, successful anglers are using. It’s a slow process because the best fishermen are taking their cues from the changing environment around them and adapting their gear and techniques to those changes. When you’re merely copying, you always seem to be a step behind. Slowly, though, the reasons the top anglers do what they do begin to reveal themselves to you, and you improve. There’s no substitute for time on the water.
In this great article from Wired2Fish, you’ll learn a valuable shortcut and get an explanation of the whys and whens behind choosing a particular style of jighead.
We’ve had a great response to our blog on five custom skirts you can build on your own for skirted bass jigs. We appreciate the feedback and response to that piece and we wanted to follow that up with one on a reoccurring question, what jigheads to we like to put these skirts on when bass fishing. Great question and one that certainly should be addressed.
In my mind there are really five major jighead types for skirted bass jigs. There are certainly multitudes beyond that of different shapes for each of the five major categories, for as we know in fishing, everyone wants something just a little different. But for the most part I would say the five classes of jigheads for skirted jigs would be a football jig, a swim jig, a finesse round ball jig, an Arkie or other flipping head, and a casting head.
Certainly you can swim an Arkie head or cast a ball head so there is a grey area when it comes to the application of different style heads. But I’ll go into why I think each head style is unique and the application for it is unique. But will I have all five jigheads on the deck of my boat at one time? Usually I will not. I might have a flipping jig, a football jig and a swim jig at one time on there but hardly ever all three. But when I go to different locales, I start filling my box with one particular type or another based on the situations I expect to face.
Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
Photos: Wired2Fish
