The Hair Jig’s Place
60
Many hair jigs are small – made
with short skirts and light leadheads
ranging from 1/16 ounce up to about
1/4 ounce. As such, before the resur-
gence of big bucktails that resembled
the Preacher Jig, hair jigs for bass fish-
ing were mostly reserved for small-
mouths or, more commonly, cold-
water finesse applications with light
line and spinning tackle – boring fish-
ing to many modern bass chasers.
That’s probably why the bucktail jig
reignited the category so quickly. Not
only did it catch bass that wouldn’t
touch more in-your-face baits, but it
had a big profile and could be fished
with a medium-heavy baitcasting rod
and 12- to 20-pound-test line. Anglers
also quickly realized that they could be
very successful with heads weighing
more than an ounce. It allowed for a
more aggressive type of “mid-finesse”
fishing that fit with popular tackle and
modern fishing approaches.
So are hair jigs finesse or not? That’s
tough to say because they can be
fished all sorts of ways. Generally, how-
ever, hair jig tactics range from very
subtle to the middle ground. They’re
usually fished without trailers, so they
don’t have a ton of built-in action. Yet
they’re very good “in-between” baits
because they can be fished either with
some angler-imposed movement to
garner reaction strikes or very slowly to
tempt bass with a visual offering.
“One of the common mistakes that
people make on those hair jigs [the
Preacher Jig style] is they think it’s a
solve-all,” says Tour pro Pete Ponds.
“It’s not. It’s a fill-in type of product, so
whenever they quit biting a crankbait
you can throw the hair jig and catch
five or six more, and then switch back
to the crankbait. But there have been
some guys like Buddy Gross who’ve fig-
ured out some different ways to fish it.
He caught them at Pickwick snapping it
out of eelgrass, which is something I’ve
never done.”
Even Gross, who’s won a Tour event
with a hair jig, admits that it’s part of a
system. He likes to rotate between the
hair jig and a swimbait.
“I mix them up. I have both on the
deck when I’m ledge fishing,” he says.
“They’ll hit the hair jig sometimes when
they won’t hit anything else. Usually it’s
because of fishing pressure.”
Missouri pro Dion Hibdon comes
from a family known for finesse tactics,
including fishing hair jigs. To Hibdon, the
hair jig is about like a Yamamoto Senko:
It can work almost anywhere, and bass
eat it when they won’t eat anything else.
“We’ve caught them on it ever since
I was a little kid,” he says. “That was the
original – before rubber [skirts] even.
“It’s normally for cold water. I’m talk-
ing 30s up to the mid-40s. A 3/8-ounce
Custom bucktail jig by Dion Hibdon
jig was a giant one. We fished a lot that
were 1/8 ounce and 1/4 ounce.”
Hibdon says he and other mem-
bers of his family, including his leg-
endary father, Guido, have tied hair
jigs to imitate just about every type of
baitfish, but the “primary deal” for
them was to fish a hair jig as a crawfish
imitator in spring and winter.
FLWFISHING.COM I JULY 2017