Swimming Lessons

Go Horizontal With Your Jigs

By Pete Robbins

Reproduced with the exclusive permission of Bass West Magazine, Please Click on the Bass West Enhanced banner to subscribe.

A lead head jig is typically thought of as a slow, horizontal presentation. Pitch it to dock pilings or to holes in the grass, jig it once or twice and repeat. When fish are on deeper structure you can methodically drag it over ledges. In Kentucky they may “stroke” it off the bottom, but for the most part it’s a lure that’s assumed to be most productive when allowed to fall into cover or soak on a productive spot.

Fred Roumbanis believes that if that’s all you’re using your jig for, then you’re missing the boat. Like many top pros, he frequently swims a jig where others would fish a spinnerbait, a chatterbait or a lipless crank.

The technique may be popular in pockets of the country, most notably in Alabama, but there are whole regions that are primed for this technique where relatively few anglers are utilizing it. For example, virtually “nobody on the west coast does it,” said the California native and former Delta rat.

Roumbanis isn’t one to let his mouth write checks that his rods can’t cash. Swimming a jig had him in 3rd place after the first day of this year’s Bassmaster Classic on the Red River. Perhaps more impressively, at the second Elite Series tournament of the year, on Lake Dardanelle, he caught all of his fish on it and finished 8th overall.

“I had the first limit of the tournament with it,” he recalled. “It took me less than five minutes to catch them.”

Slow? Think again.

Alabama Roots

While pockets of the country, like the upper sections of the Mississippi River, have spawned a bunch of jig swimmers, there’s no doubt that the technique has its strongest foothold in the state of Alabama.

Some top Alabama sticks have been swimming a jig for two decades or more, but it really got momentum there in the past decade and nationally only in the past five years or so. Tour-level anglers like Randy Howell have made a living by keeping a jig high in the water column and some of that has leaked out onto Saturday morning television.

Charles Clemons, owner of Alabama’s Tightline Jigs (www.tightlinejigs.com), has seen his business increase as the technique has taken off, and by charting his sales, he’s managed to conduct an informal market study of why Alabama’s waterways are so conducive to this tactic.

First, there are waters like Lay Lake and Wheeler, which feature what he termed “bank grass.” When swimming a jig around that sort of cover, he likes “to pump it and make it jump, but not out of the water.” By using a 6:1 or 7:1 gear ratio reel, he can burn it the jig within two inches of the surface to provoke jarring strikes.

There’s also Guntersville, possibly the best big bass lake in the southeast, owing mostly to its abundant grass fields. “I’ll fish it over the milfoil there, before it gets real high,” he explained. “You want it a little bit slower, so it just barely touches the top of the milfoil.”

While Clemons chases largemouths and smallmouths primarily, his sales numbers also show that there’s an application for jig swimming in spotted bass territory. He gets some monster jig orders from the tackle stores around Lake Martin and Logan Martin. So not only does Alabama offer a wide variety of vegetation, but it also has all three major species of bass in abundance – where better to develop a near-universal technique?

When,Where and How?

Elite Series pro and shallow water specialist Bill Lowen almost never hits the water without a swimming jig tied on. Maybe at Erie, when subtle offshore drops call for only a tube or a dropshot, he’ll have it in the bottom of the rod locker, but otherwise it’s just about always one of the first rods out of the rod box.

Any place other anglers would throw a spinnerbait, Lowen often favors the jig, because “nine out of ten times when they won’t eat the spinnerbait they’ll eat the jig fished the same way. It has no vibration so it’s very subtle.”

Roumbanis agreed that a swimming jig allows him to cover water at least as efficiently as a blade, if not better. It simply provides him with a greater variety of effective retrieve speeds without changing rods.

“You can fish it faster than a spinnerbait or slow it down,” he said. “It’s a universal technique. You can cover water, but then if you see a piece of cover you can let it fall. It’s an amazing way to locate fish.”

“Once you find them, there may be a better way to catch them,” Roumbanis said, but as a search bait it’s virtually unequalled. Even when he’s had high finishes in tournaments primarily on other lures, often times the jig is the unsung hero from practice.

He ties it on when the water temperatures hit 55 degrees and it doesn’t come out of the rod locker until the end of the fall. It particularly excels when fish are active, but not quite aggressive enough to hit a topwater.”

Both anglers noted that the technique is well-suited to areas where emergent or patchy aquatic vegetation exist, but by no means is it limited to that circumstance. Pump it along the edge of boat docks and hold on as fish bolt out to engulf it. It can be retrieved down the length of a laydown and killed at the very end. It’s also dynamite in open water, and if you think it’s a largemouth-only technique, you’re sadly mistaken. Both spotted bass and smallies will just about rip the rod out of your hand, around cover and in open water.

“It’s a pure reaction bite,” Roumbanis said. “And if you get a bite (and the fish misses) you can throw back and they’ll eat it again.”

Many Alabama anglers like to shake or pump the rod tip as they retrieve their jig. Others just hold the rod tip high and steadily wind it in. Lowen uses a variety of retrieve techniques and lets the fish tell him what they want. “I tell everybody to do exactly what they do with a spinnerbait. You can just throw it and reel it, or hop it or shake it. Every day is different. “

Not Just Any Jig

While Lowen said that the technique is simple, he’s a firm believer in matching the right jig to the task. He wouldn’t use a flipping jig where a finesse jig is required, nor would he use a football head jig when trying to penetrate matted vegetation. Similarly, this presentation requires a precision tool if you want to avoid getting hung up or missing too many strikes.

Accordingly, Lowen designed a swim jig for D&L Tackle to meet his needs. “The whole key is having a head that’s hydrodynamic, more of a bullet point than an Arkie-shape,” he explained.

“Lots of them have a light wire hook, but mine is really stout,” he continued.

Roumbanis has likewise designed a specialized jig for this technique. His signature model, known at the Magician Swim Jig, is manufactured by Black Angel Jigs. (www.blackangeljigs.com). Like Lowen’s it features a “cone-shaped head, a gliding shape,” Roumbanis explained. “It has a horizontal line tie, which makes it run true. When you use a vertical tie there’s no counterbalance so it twirls around.” It also has a bait keeper to keep your trailer in place. Otherwise, he said, you’d consistently have to spend valuable time re-aligning your plastic trailer.

Clemons also puts a horizontal line tie on his lures, which he says enables it to swim better. But he also cautioned that anglers should avoid going with a jig that’s too heavy. While many manufacturers (including Clemons) offer swim jigs in 3/8 or _ ounce sizes, he finds himself most often reaching for a _ ounce or even a 3/16 ounce version, which prevents the lure from getting mired in the cover and allows for a particularly tantalizing retrieve action.

Trailers and Colors

Both Lowen and Roumbanis tailor their trailer choice to the conditions at hand, as dictated by cover and the aggressiveness of the bass on a particular day. The key considerations seemed to be bulk and action.

Under pressure, both of them mentioned that one of their favorites is an Optimum Bait Company Double Diamond swimbait.

“With other trailers, you get an erratic action by pumping the rod,” Roumbanis explained. “But on the Double Diamond, you get that same action whether you slow roll or burn it.”

Lowen agreed that the Double Diamond is just “phenomenal because of the kicky, paddly tails,” but both of them will experiment with different options in practice to figure out the best choice for that week. When the Double Diamond is too much, Lowen often reverts to a single-tail grub.

“Sometimes it’s a Horny Toad or a Speed Craw,” Roumbanis said. “Sometimes a 5-inch Kalin’s (single-tail) grub or a Yamamoto twin tail or a Paca Craw.” His signature jig from Black Angel has a few extra-long skirt strands that protrude out the back for extra action. They also continue to pulsate when the lure is at rest.

They tend to keep it simple when it comes to color: Both like a shad pattern, either natural or white; both like black/blue, particularly in dirty water; and the last and possibly most frequent choice is some sort of bluegill imitation, usually green pumpkin for Roumbanis and green pumpkin with blue flash for Lowen. A color-coordinated trailer completes the package.

Clemons has several bluegill imitators that see heavy duty on the end of his line. One favorite is called “Mean Green” and features strands of plum, green, brown and black. He said that 95 percent of the time he uses a black with blue flake Zoom Ultra Vibe Speed Craw as a trailer, regardless of what color jig he’s throwing. He said that the legs don’t break off as easily as on some other craws, and unlike the hollow-bodied version he can trim it down as needed.

Under intense questioning, Roumbanis did reveal one effective color that is slightly out of the ordinary – an all-bubblegum monstrosity that he refers to as “Miss Piggy.” He doesn’t know what it represents or why it works, but said that “in the early spring it is deadly on the big females.”

Tackle Matters

Like any technique, swimming a jig requires a rod that handles to oddities of this technique – the fish are often buried in heavy cover, so it’s essential that the rod have a lot of backbone, but because it’s a moving bait, a little bit of give is also required.

If you use most manufacturers’ self-labeled “jig rods” or flipping sticks and you’ll sacrifice casting accuracy and pull the lure away from a lot of fish. You’ll also need forearms like Popeye in order to swim the jig all day. If you try to go lighter and utilize a typical spinnerbait rod, the big fish that tend to fall for the jig are going to wrap you up or pull off. But until recently, neither angler could find a rod that combined the best of both worlds.

Lowen has designed a rod that he feels maximizes his effectiveness, and it’s now available from All-Pro Rods (www.allprorods.com). “For years we swam a jig on a flipping stick and by the end of the day you’d be worn out,” he said. “So we took that (7’6”) rod and put a spinnerbait tip on it. You can roll cast and skip docks with it in a way you can’t with a flipping stick.”

Roumbanis uses his 7’6” American Eagle Rods RoumBASStik Toad rod (see www.americaneaglerods.com, available at www.elitebass.com) for many of the same reasons. “It’s a medium-heavy action which allows you to let them load up on it,” he said. Both of them use a high-speed baitcasting reel spooled up with braided line (30 lb. Stren Super Braid for Lowen, 40 lb. Power Pro for Roumbanis), so that little bit of extra give provides needed cushion on the often-jarring strikes.

Clemons agreed with the two touring pros: “If you use too stiff a rod you tend to jerk it away from the fish when it hits.”

Despite their highly-refined equipment and semi-secretive ways, both anglers stressed that this is a simple technique to learn and utilize. The biggest mistakes you can make are to limit the times and places you fish a jig and to only fish it vertically.

“To be honest, it’s kind of a no-brainer,” Lowen said. “It’s a simple technique and guys think too much about it.”

Tubes Too

If you think that a jig is the only bottom-bouncer that you can swim, you’re missing the next chapter in this story. For years, a dedicated group of anglers, particularly in Florida, have presented paddletail worms horizontally, with a retrieve more typically suited to a spinnerbait than to a Texas rig.

Veteran Oklahoma pro OT Fears let another cat out of the bag at this year’s FLW Series event on Alabama’s Lake Eufaula when he caught a monster 9-08 largemouth by swimming a tube. It’s a technique that some savvy anglers have used around weedbeds on the Arkansas River for a number of years, but its value hit home for Fears at an event on the Red River a few years back.

“To tell you how thick the jungle was, let me say that you had to use your big motor to get over the stobs to get where the fish were,” he explained. “Then when you stopped, you’d be sitting there on top of them, out of the water. But that’s where the fish were and if you sat there a while and let it calm down the fish would start busting minnows.

“I threw everything in the book at them,” he continued. “You could catch one now and then on a worm or on a spinnerbait, but then my partner started swimming a little tube and busting them pretty good and of course I followed suit.”

Since then, it’s become an important part of his arsenal, not just around timber like he found on the Red River, but also around laydowns, rocks, docks and vegetation.

Why a tube instead of a jig?

“Unless it’s weighted real heavy, a tube is inherently weightless,” he explained, so by keeping his rod tip high he can allow the lure to follow the contour of the cover he’s fishing without making a ruckus and without having to burn the bait. He’ll occasionally add a 1/16 or 1/8 ounce bullet weight “to keep the nose down when you kill it,” but otherwise it’s a feather compared to even the lightest jigs.

His favorite colors are black with blue flake and black with red flake.