Casting Jigs in a Lake or River

Several years ago, a friend of mine told me that he wanted to show me how to catch fish in a way that he was sure I had never tried before. When I asked him to tell me exactly what he was talking about, his reply was that I would have to go with him to find out what he meant.

I was eager for him to pick me up the following weekend, and the minute I hopped into his truck, I asked him what we were going to be fishing with that was so top secret, he couldn't have told me about it earlier.

“Jigs,” he said. “We are going to be fishing with 4 inch long tube jigs.”

I laughed!

At this point in my life, I had done quite a bit of fishing and tried many different lures, flies and baits. I was quite certain that big jigs like that were reserved for lake trout fishing, and there was no way that a trout in a river was going to bite something that big and unwieldy. Besides that, jigs are for ice fishing. A fisherman drops the jig down the hole and jerks the pole up and down every once in a while hoping that  fish will come by and bite.

This, I soon found out, was not the case. Fishing jigs in a river or in a lake is much like fishing a lure or spoon with long casts and slow retrieves. There is lots of casting, lots of work, and lots of action.

We launched the drift boat and walked over to fish the hole directly below the dam before we set off down the river. My buddy took the first cast with a big ugly white jig and instantly hooked into a fish. Several minutes later, I helped him land a chunky 24 inch rainbow. I didn't need any more convincing. I tied on a jig and caught several nice fish that day. I spent that rest of that spring learning how to fish with jigs.

Since that time, I have caught trout on jigs in all kinds of lakes, ponds, and rivers. If there are fish in the water, a good bet is that a jig will catch them.

Since that first trip, I have also used all sorts of jigs: rubber tubes, bucktails, maribou, and all sorts of combinations of the three. Fishing jigs can still be sketchy. There are days when the fish just won't bite anything. However, more often than not, if the fish are going to bite, a jig will hook up more fish than any other bait.

-Jeremy Kaiser