Have modern-day anglers overcomplicated the simple art of fluking?
Jigs might be considered to be the quintessential way to take fluke. It’s like the darter for striped bass or the cedar plug for school tuna. Many of us would call the jig essential. I fully agree with this.
The jig—how can you refute it? It’s older than the sea itself. Or seems to be. However, with me, I’m embarrassed to point out that my fluke jig box onboard my boat is nothing really but a pile of rusted hooks and matted bucktails.
I can’t tell you the last time my hand reached into the box for one. What happened? Is it me or has the jig run its course?
Rigs & Jigs
I used to jig. I caught a lot of fluke with jigs, mostly bucktails. This began off Green Hill Beach and Matunuck Beach, the somewhat famous fluke grounds just west of Point Judith, Rhode Island. This is mellow fluke bottom, shallow with relatively forgiving tides. You can fish bucktails here on almost any summer day. And I did. Then I got a commercial finfish license. I wanted to catch more fluke and so I fished more rods. Enter the drag rig and the hi-low rig. These are your basic bottom rigs that we all pretty much know about. The centerpiece of the rig is the bank sinker. The rig has countless variations. You can have long and short drops, from an inch or two to many feet. It holds bottom well. It fishes well on bony bottom or smooth. You can run it plain or load it up with spinners and flash.
I’m not alone in using these rigs. They seem almost universal. These are the rigs I see down on the Point Judith docks where I tie up. I don’t see too many bucktails. So, I asked myself: has the fluke jig seen its last sunset? Has the method been slowly replaced? I decided to do a bit of research. I took a drive to Snug Harbor Marina, a short drive for me, the other side of Salt Pond. Snug has been in the tackle game for as long as I can remember. When I was a boy I used to stand on the dock and marvel at all the charter boats and the hustle of Snug staff carting flats of tuna bait and shark chum around. The place always seemed alive to me.
When I got there, Matt Conti, the store manager, was there putting a topshot of mono on Penn 130. I just came right out and asked, no prelude, “Matt do people still jig for fluke?” He stopped doing what he was doing. He kind of laughed, looked up at me. “Definitely. We sell tons of jigs for fluke.” He walked over to the wall. On the wall were basically hundreds of jigs. Ball jigs, banana jigs, Spro jigs, bean jigs. Tons of different colors and different weights. I get it. I’ve been rummaging in tackle shops for decades, but I asked again: “But do people still use jigs like we used to use them? You know ‘back in the day’.”
Jig Love
“Yes. Absolutely. People love catching fluke on jigs,” Matt said. “When I go fluking all I really use is a single bucktail no more than 1.5 ounces tipped with spearing or squid. I don’t care how fast the drift is. I stay with a light jig. Big fluke love a small bucktail. I keep working it like a slow pitch, casting up drift, working it along the bottom till my line angles back. Then I reel in and do it again. It’s active fishing.”
Matt went and got his fluke rod. He had it above the cash register in a ceiling-mounted rod rack. The rod had the look of a modern slow pitch rod, long butt, short fore grip. Super sensitive. The jig on the rod was a 1.5-ounce straight hook bucktail ball jig, all white. “This is what I use. I like to jig side-to-side with my wrist. Not so much up and down. I don’t jig much, just a little motion.”
This got me thinking. Maybe I’ve been living in a cave. So, I made a couple of phone calls, guys I know and have fished with, both charter captains. One of them is local to me, the Point Judith area and the other fishes around the Cape. I called James Orifice, who everyone calls Jimmy O. Jimmy grew up on Charlestown Pond in Rhode Island. He used to own a tackle store in Connecticut called Jimmy O’s. Lately, he’s been running light tackle charters, Jimmy Ocean Guiding Service, out of Point Judith. He loves fishing light gear in shallow water for stripers, albacore, and fluke. I figured Jimmy to be a jig guy.
“I love jigs. Definitely don’t forget your jigs when you go fishing,” he said. Jimmy prefers more of an old school set up. White jig, Upperman style, which is the old name for the lima bean head jig made famous at the Jersey Shore by brothers Morrie and Bill Upperman. Jimmy said he uses a teaser fly about 14 inches above the jig. “I’ve been using that rig since the 90s. When I used to run the tackle shop, I had a lot of fly guys. They all tied Clouser minnows and deceivers for stripers. I started using these flies for fluke teasers and never looked back.”
For jigging motion, he uses either long sweeps of the rod tip going high over his head or he keeps the jig on the bottom and uses a slow but steady jerk. “You have to pay attention to the rod. A lot of people miss fluke hits or they drop the fluke a few seconds after setting the hook.” Jimmy spends a lot of time fishing from Point Judith to Quonny Breachway. “It’s all good jig bottom through there. At the Island (Block), I’ll use heavier jigs but in close to shore I like lighter jigs. Try tipping the teasers and jigs with the freshest bait you can get. I try and net my own bait in the salt ponds, fresh spearing is hard to beat. I will use Gulp and Gulp works great but I like catching my own bait and using that. Mackerel, squid. Whatever is around.”
Keeping It Simple
Then I called Willy Hatch, captain of the Machaca out of Falmouth, Massachusetts, Willy runs fluke trips wherever the fluke are biting. He’ll fish Noman’s off the Vineyard, he’ll fish Vineyard Sound and Nantucket Sound and, of course, he’ll fish the Nantucket Shoals. He’s been fishing for decades and has a real knack for catching, producing, and it doesn’t seem to matter what—stripers, blackfish, bluefin, and fluke… he’s just good at it. I asked Willie about jigging fluke. Like Jimmy and Matt his answer came fast and without hesitation: “It’s the only way to fluke. To me there is no better way. If you have good jig conditions, light winds, light tide then it’s the best way to catch fluke.”
On the Nantucket Shoals for example, where Willie spends a fair amount of time, the tidal pump can really crank. “I have guys who fish very light braid, 15-pound, and fish light rods. These guys, at and around slack tide, in 80 to 100 feet of water, using bucktails, will out-fish the boat. You can really crush at slack water with jigs.”
Willie, I could hear it in his voice, his tone, spoke with a shred of annoyance: “It seems people have complicated things with fluke. All these crazy rigs with every kind of bait hanging off the hooks. The jig is simple. I knew a commercial guy who made a living with a single bucktail and a piece of fluke belly. Things haven’t changed. People have gotten lazy. All you need is one jig and put a tiny bit of action in it, just a nervous tremor of your wrist.”
So these conversations got me thinking about how I fish. Have I gotten lazy in my approach, using the same rig, the same way? Sure, it catches. But could I catch better, maybe net bigger fish? In fishing, more so when we have years in the game, we can become complacent. I troll wire line for stripers for my customers. The method is deadly. But jigging with soft plastics over those same schools also works —-if you dedicate the time to learning how to do it. Same with fluke jigging.
As Jimmy says, “Don’t forget your jigs.” For me, it’s a matter of buying some new ones. Jimmy and Matt like the ball jig, Willie likes the Spro. I will grab some of both. Tie one on and try make them dance.
