Jig heads are weighted hooks that you thread a soft plastic lure onto. They make it possible to change your lure very quickly without retying your rig. There are several types of jig head with different uses, and we will go through each type below. The most common and cheapest jig heads have ‘ball heads’…
Ball head jig heads are well suited for bumping along the bottom as they tend to lean forwards allowing the soft lure to sit ‘ass up’. This means your lure is more visible to fish when on the bottom. A simple ball head jig head is the best choice when you want a cheap general purpose jig head.
Then you have dart jig heads and finesse jig heads, which are both designed to move side to side when twitched to imitate an injured fish. These work well with straight tail lures that have limited actions without a dart jig head. These are used by those practicing LRF fishing or targeting trout or perch on ultra light rods casting under 10g.
Finesse jig heads are useful when you’re fishing ultra light with straight tailed lures and you’re targeting fish that respond well to erratic movements like smelt, herring or summer perch.
There are also level swim heads, which are designed to fall parallel to the surface of the water (rather than nose dive like most jig heads). These often have a cylinder, or bullet shape, similar to the weight on a drop shot rig.
When you’re simply casting and retrieving a lure through the midwater or near the surface and you want the most natural presentation possible. This is because some level swim heads have fish-designed heads that blend into your lures body more naturally than a standard ball weight.
Often if a paddle tail has a head of its own, I will bite that off to replace it with the lead head on the jighead.
There are weedless jig heads, which have weedless hooks to avoid snagging. These are useful for perch fishing anywhere with lots of snags, be they lily pads, reeds or submerged shopping trolleys.
Use weedless jig heads when you’re fishing over snaggy ground near the bottom and don’t want to lose all your tackle. Weedless jig heads are also useful when you want direct contact with your lure and weight at the same time.
Neutral buoyancy jig heads are not made from lead but from resin. They cast well but unlike lead sink very slowly. These are useful for suspending lures in the very top section of the water.
Hidden weight jig heads have the weight on the shank of the hook. This means when you rig a soft plastic little or none of the weight is visible.
These are useful for extremely cautious fish in pressured waters when you want a hyper-realistic presentation with no weight visible.
Ned rig jig heads have a short cylinder shape which is designed to make the lure sit ass up on the bottom. This makes your soft plastic look like a fish feeding on the bottom – a very natural presentation. People use these with straight-tail lures like sluggos or senkos. These jig heads also provide superior sensitivity to the bottom than other designs, probably because of the flat face. They have taken the US bass fishing world by storm and are also effective for UK lure fishing.
When you’re dead sticking with a senko and you want your lure to sit proud off the bottom to make it more visible and not just lie flat. Useful in the dead of winter for tough bass fishing days. It would work for wrasse but this level of finesse is never required for them. Useful for winter perch with creature baits.
The Cheb Rig is gaining popularity in the UK as a superior form of weedless jig head. It allows you to change your hook and weight size easily while fishing. This means you can simply carry a few different sized weights and hooks and modify your approach without retying or recliping a whole new rig.
A normal weedless jig head comes with a lead weight welded to the hook. On the Cheb Rig, the weight and hook attach separately. This is useful for advanced lure anglers that wish to fish with larger hooks with tiny weights, or small hooks with heavier weights. It’s pretty hard to find size 2/0 hooks with a 1-2g weight. Or a size 10 hook with a 10g head.
The cheb rig is useful for fishing rough snaggy ground, or when you want to be able to change your hook or weight size quickly when covering different types of ground quickly. It’s a rig for pretty serious anglers, most people are better off with regular weedless jig heads.
The cheb rig has many applications in UK fishing both in saltwater and freshwater. When perch fishing for example in a snaggy canal with ultra light rods and reels, you could use a cheb rig to get a direct contact with your lure that you wouldn’t get with the Texas Rig. The free-running weight on the texas rig can make subtle bites harder to detect.
The extra movement between the weight and the hook also means soft lures can move more freely, improving your lures action.
Ready Made Carp RigsWeedless weightless soft plastics aren’t actually weightless. The soft plastic body of the lure provides enough weight that with a modern bass rod that casts under 28g as a maximum, you can cast them effectively. You can also use weighted weedless hooks to add additional weight, like the ones that come with this kit.
When bass are following plugs but not taking, weedless weightless lures save us from blanking. Often this is when water clarity is excellent and the fish have a longer time to suss out that your treble-covered hard lure isn’t what it claims to be! Conversely, in rougher seas and on windier days it’s often impractical to fish weedless and weightless.
Weedless weightless lures also allow you to fish over the roughest, shallowest ground, without your lure immediately sinking to the bottom. There is a type of weed that bass love to lurk in called devils hair or sea spaghetti – it’s that one with the long thin fronds that float up in the water towards the surface. You can’t pull a plug through that…
If you’re into LRF fishing for mini species or lure fishing for mullet, then the split shot rig is useful
The split shot rig was originally used for freshwater bait fishing. LRF anglers use it for mini species like scorpion fish and gobies. In fresh water, split shot are used beneath small floats and serve the purpose of keeping the float upright and allowing the baited hook to sink. When the saltwater guys use them for targeting very small fish, they use worm imitations as bait, with just a few split shot to make the lure sink. Sometimes this rig is used to target mullet, because the tiny split shot allow for a very subtle presentation, but its usage is pretty niche.
It’s also possible to use split shot to add a little extra weight to a weedless weightless rig. That’s a rig that has no weight at all – just a soft plastic on a hook. It’s used when you want a lure to sink very, very slowly. That can be useful over extremely shallow ground, or when you just want to achieve a hyper-realistic presentation for spooky fish.
Split shots do cause some line damage, since they grip the line by pinching it. Unless you are an LRF angler, their only use for you in the UK will be adding a little extra weight to an unweighted soft plastic.
Split shots do cause some line damage, since they grip the line by pinching it. Unless you are an LRF angler, their only use for you in the UK will be adding a little extra weight to an unweighted soft plastic.
A rig (also called a trace) is simply the end tackle (hooks, swivels, links and so on) which is attached to the line and cast into the sea. Rigs are made up of various items of terminal tackle with anglers either creating their own rigs or buying them ready-made from a tackle shop or an online retailer.
Reading sea fishing magazines, books or some websites can give the impression that making rigs is complicated and difficult but this is not the case. Very simple rigs can catch fish, and simple rigs will often outfish complicated ones. This page considers the different types of rigs which can be made and used in UK sea fishing and includes links to components for sale on Amazon or Sea Angling Shop which will open in a new window.
There is a huge range of ready-made rigs available to anglers from online retailers and fishing tackle shops. However, most anglers will build up a supply of terminal tackle and use this to tie their own rigs, allowing them to make rigs to their own specifications and exactly tailored to the species of fish they are targeting and the marks they are fishing.
Top Swivel – This provides a point to clip or tie the rig onto the mainline and also eliminates line twist which can damage and weaken line.
Link or Clip – This is used to clip the weight onto the rig and is also essential as failure to include this link would lead to line damage and safety issues when casting.
Rig Body Line – The rig body should be made with strong line (of at least 60lb breaking strain) to resist abrasion with rocks and the seabed and to ensure that the rig is strong enough to take the power of casting. Furthermore, if crimps are used they can damage line weaker than 60lbs breaking strain.
Snoods (also known as hooklengths) – These are lengths of line which branch off from the rig body and terminate in a hook. Generally, sea fishing rigs have one, two or three snoods. The best way of attaching them to the rig body is with a trapped swivel, although in cheaper, simpler rigs a dropper knot can be used. Line such as WSB Specimen Mono is a good choice for snoods as it is memory free, meaning it stays straighter and is much less likely to tangle than normal monofilament.
A range of other components and accessories can be added to a rig such as impact shields, cascade swivels, bait clips and rotten bottoms/weak link releases. These are considered in more detail below.
Once rigs are completed they are stored and carried to the fishing venue in a rig wallet, although foam rig winders are becoming increasingly popular to store rigs on.
