Hi,
I'm off to South Africa for a month in February and will be doing a fair amount of shore fishing and spinning. In order to research the area I'm visiting I've been on a couple of South African forums to get info on the likely species, locations and methods. I've been struck by how many contributors sing the praises of using jigheads dressed with bucktail of up to a couple of ounces in the surf, a method that seems to have lost some appeal with the advent of soft plastics. Many of the guys say that it is their default method from open surf beaches and generally outfishes all others, particularly for predatory species like kob, steenbras, leerfish and shad (the first two are not dissimilar to our UK bass although they do go much larger). The area I'm visiting along the Garden Route is basically a few hundred miles of uninterrupted open surf beaches with consistently large waves punctuated by the occasional estuary. I notice also on other forums that many USA anglers have similar success with bucktail jigheads from the shore with striped bass.
It seems that the retrieval method is key and it's aquestion of allowing the jighead to hit the bottom and then by trial and error finding the best retrieval rate and method that works on the day. They say that colour is not critical but most agree that white is usually the best predominant colour.
I've never tried this method in the UK although it would obviously be effective in deep water from boats but I would imagine that it would be interesting to target bass from the shore and might even trigger the highly predatory instincts of flatties such as flounder and turbot. It certainly works for flounder in the US as demonstrated by some YouTube videos but then again their flounders grow big (up to and beyond 6 kilos with huge mouths) but perhaps a smallish jighead bucktail on a sze 1 hook or something similar worked slowly over the mudflats or even an open beach might work.
Just thought I'd throw this out there to see if anyone has used these types of lure from the shore in the UK with any success. I guess that one of the benefits would be that with a 1-2 ounce jighead you would be able to cast a fair distance and cover a lot of ground with each cast.
I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this subject.
I'm off to South Africa for a month in February and will be doing a fair amount of shore fishing and spinning. In order to research the area I'm visiting I've been on a couple of South African forums to get info on the likely species, locations and methods. I've been struck by how many contributors sing the praises of using jigheads dressed with bucktail of up to a couple of ounces in the surf, a method that seems to have lost some appeal with the advent of soft plastics. Many of the guys say that it is their default method from open surf beaches and generally outfishes all others, particularly for predatory species like kob, steenbras, leerfish and shad (the first two are not dissimilar to our UK bass although they do go much larger). The area I'm visiting along the Garden Route is basically a few hundred miles of uninterrupted open surf beaches with consistently large waves punctuated by the occasional estuary. I notice also on other forums that many USA anglers have similar success with bucktail jigheads from the shore with striped bass.
It seems that the retrieval method is key and it's aquestion of allowing the jighead to hit the bottom and then by trial and error finding the best retrieval rate and method that works on the day. They say that colour is not critical but most agree that white is usually the best predominant colour.
I've never tried this method in the UK although it would obviously be effective in deep water from boats but I would imagine that it would be interesting to target bass from the shore and might even trigger the highly predatory instincts of flatties such as flounder and turbot. It certainly works for flounder in the US as demonstrated by some YouTube videos but then again their flounders grow big (up to and beyond 6 kilos with huge mouths) but perhaps a smallish jighead bucktail on a sze 1 hook or something similar worked slowly over the mudflats or even an open beach might work.
Just thought I'd throw this out there to see if anyone has used these types of lure from the shore in the UK with any success. I guess that one of the benefits would be that with a 1-2 ounce jighead you would be able to cast a fair distance and cover a lot of ground with each cast.
I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this subject.
