After watchig Ken and then trying out the drifting of small jigs in the current last Saturday, I came back to Salem all fired up! Ken had kindly shared some of his stash of grubs and curly tails with me and Lyle had given me a few small Owner jigs to try out. Sunday morning, I went down to the old Lead Mills Bridge and tried out the technique. As luck would have it, there were some Cormorants feeding some distance out near the edge of the outflowing rip. I put on a 3" pogie colored grub and tossed it out into the current and began my drift. Since I had no other size jigs, I was limited to changing up colors if the this combination didn't work. After several drifts, I switched to a longer curly tail that he had given me. More of a worm color and tried several more drifts. Still no luck. Swithed gain to a 3" sort of pearly grub that he had given to me. This worked! On the third drift, I was on to my first bass of the year. Over the next 20 to 30 minutes, I got three more fish, including one that was 28" long! I was tickled! I also knew that I had been lucky because i only had the one size jig....
This technique is deceptively simple. Think of it as fly fishing with a spinning rod and small flies. Make your cast and then you can either flip your bail and do a wet line swing or you can keep your bail open and as the fly begind to drift, feed line out and you can really extend the drift, eapecially in some current. A few things that I observed. Keep in touch with your line with the hand that's not holding the spinning rod, just as you would your fly line. You can better feel the strike. The challenge here is, as with flies, keeping in touch with the jig. My learning curve will be to do that consistently. Keeping the line just tight enough, but not so tight as to disturb the drifting jig. You need to hold your rod tip high. And you'll find that if you're casting across current, that there's a point where the drift will stop of its own accord, as the jig swings out of the current flow.
What I'm particularly excited about are the other potential applications! I can visualize doing this on the beach, where those nice little outgoing rips form as waves recede from shore, in the rocks where the water funnels back into the ocean off the rocks and around the sand bars and channels that form up on Crane Beach as the tide ebbs and floods. I know of a few overhanging banks back up in the estuaries that that this presentation could be just the ticket! And, it just occured to me that I could fish this way from my kayak around the boulders of of Marblehead Neck.
Yep, it's going to be a fun summer!
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