Early Season Jig Fishing – Jig Fishing
The lakes are starting to thaw out in some parts of the North Country and this is my favorite time to pull out the V&M Pacemaker series of jigs! Cliff Pace designed these jigs himself for V&M and they catch a ton of fish for me.
When the lakes start to warm up and the ice melts, these jigs are always tied on my rods!
The first jig is the Flatline football jig. This is a very good bait to fish around rocky points, rip-rap and anywhere else there is rock. I like to fish it very slow and crawl it along the bottom. I match it up with a V&M Wild Craw for a trailer and the profile looks like the real thing, it matches the forage perfectly! I like to use 1/2 oz. up to 3/4 oz. depending on what depth I’m fishing! If I’m fishing really deep I’ll use 12 or 14-pound If I’m fishing shallow I’ll use 16 or 20-pound I really like the Sunline Super FC Sniper fluorocarbon on my Lews reel for this application because I can get a really good feel of what is down on the bottom of the lake. If the fish are eating crawdads deep, the Flatline football jig is the way to go!
The second jig is the V&M Adrenaline flipping jig. This is my jig of choice when the water temperature is just warm enough to hold fish in and around shallow cover. Early in the springtime, when the fish just start to move shallow after ice-out, I catch fish on this jig flipped and pitched around wood and boat docks. I will match this jig up with a V&M Wild Craw as well because again I’m trying to mimic a crawdad, and this combination really does a great job!
This is combat fishing at its finest!
I get a big strong flipping stick, high speed Lews Tournament Pro reel spooled with 20 to 25-pound Sunline Super FC Sniper fluorocarbon and its game on! Some of the biggest fish in the lake will get super shallow during this time of year and I really like to catch them flipping this jig in and around the cover they are in! It has big strong hook to help land those huge fish!
The last jig is the V&M Pacemaker Pulse Swim jig. This is a great bait to swim around any shallow cover that the bass will be holding in. I mainly focus on grass when I’m fishing this bait. It comes through the vegetation very well and the bass can’t resist it! The fish really like to get shallow around whatever vegetation they can find. They flat out eat this bait early in the spring! I like to fish it around grass or lily pad stems.
Even though the water is cold, the pad stems have already started to grow and are about six to twelve inches off of the bottom. All of the other types of grasses in these lakes are dead. The pads start to grow before anything else. The largemouth will use these pad stems as cover to ambush bluegill and perch that are in the pads as well. That’s why the Pulse Swim Jig is so effective this time of year. It mimics the exact forage that the bass are eating. I like to use a V&M Thunder Shad Jr. as a trailer with the jig because it has a great swimming action and when matched with the jig, the combination looks just like a bluegill. I like to fish the swim jig with a slow to medium retrieve, fast enough to keep the jig swimming right at the top of the pad stems.
The bass will go crazy!
I use at least 16-pound Sunline Super FC Sniper fluorocarbon on my Lews reel with the swim jig. I don’t use anything lighter then 16-pound because the fish do have cover that they can get me hung up in. This is a great way to catch early season bass!
All of these jigs come in an assortment of awesome colors and they also have very sharp hooks that will help you get them every time! I hope you can use some of these tips to help you put some more jig fish in the boat this spring!
Next time you are out fishing a lake this spring, give the V&M Pacemaker Jigs a try, you wont be disappointed!
“Do Whatever It Takes”
Nik Autrey
