Jigging for muskies

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Hamilton Reef
Posts: 1156
Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2005 9:43 am
Location: Montague, MI on White River

Jigging for muskies

Post by Hamilton Reef » Sun Jul 10, 2005 8:59 am

Jigging for muskies is the real deal

Sunday, July 10, 2005 , By Bob Gwizdz
http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/statewide ... 110310.xml

WINDSOR, Ontario -- The jig is up.

You can cast for muskies, you can troll for muskies, you can even set out foot-long sucker minnows under bobbers for muskies.

But if you want to catch more and bigger muskies, you'll jig for them.

That's the word from Jon Bondy, who is making a name for himself with a radical new approach to muskie fishing on the Detroit River.

"A 50-inch muskie is the fish of a lifetime," said Bondy, a 32-year-old fishing guide. "Well, I caught five of them in the first 10 days of the season this year."

Bondy started jigging for muskies last year out of necessity, he says. He was doing well casting big plugs and bucktail spinners over the weed beds on the flats early in the day, but after the sun rose high in the sky (about 10 a.m. or so), the action stalled. Unless it was overcast, the bite was over.

So Bondy, who is among the best-known walleye guides on the river, put on his thinking cap. He thought about how every spring he caught a half dozen or so muskies while jigging for walleyes.

So he gave jigging for muskies a try. And in short order, he started scoring big fish.

"Last spring, I caught eight 30-pounders in the first two weeks of the season," he said. "All eight came jigging."

Sounds like a fish tale, doesn't it? Bondy said he'd show me.

He did.

I fished with Bondy two afternoons in June (we fished in the afternoon because he's been booked solid all spring and he squeezed me in after his paying customers were finished for the day). The first time, I hooked, but lost, a big fish. It came out of the water like a submarine-launched missile and threw the bait. Big as a barracuda -- it was every bit of four feet in length -- that fish convinced me Bondy wasn't as "full of it" as he accused me of thinking he was.

An hour later, Bondy landed a 47 1/2-inch muskie.

Beauty, eh?

About a week later, I spent another afternoon shift on the river with Bondy. About 90 minutes into it, I felt something clomp onto the bait I was jigging in 28 feet of water. It measured 45 inches. A couple of hours later, Bondy boated a slightly smaller specimen.

Jigging for muskies is the real deal.

Bondy uses saltwater-class rods and either 50- or 80-pound braided line with a steel leader connected to his bait, his own creation that he's dubbed a "Bondy Bait."

It's a soft-plastic body bait with a tail spinner, an integral wire frame and a pair of 4/0 treble hooks. It measures about 8 inches, weighs in at 7 ounces and resembles, more or less, a sheepshead, the species that Bondy says he's been told is muskies' primary forage on Lake St. Clair.

Bondy fishes the bait along steep drops, either adjoining flats where he's had success casting for the big toothy critters or in places he's caught muskies in the past while walleye jigging. (My 45-incher came from the latter, the first time he'd ever tried it for muskies.)

The drill is relatively simple. Free-spool the bait to the bottom and commence jigging.

It's a little bit more exaggerated than walleye jigging -- instead of picking the bait up a foot or so, you pick it up two or three feet -- but the principle is the same: Keep it moving and follow the bait back down with the rod tip as the majority of the bites will come on the fall.

But, it differs from walleye fishing in one important aspect: There is no modest tick that makes you suspect there might be a fish biting. When these brutes take the bait, they try to jerk your shoulder out of the socket.

I've known about Bondy's secret technique for about a year, but he told me he wouldn't show me the drill unless I promised to keep quiet about it until he'd worked out all the details. Now that he has, I'm free to tell the world.

The technique, Bondy said, is not at all weather-dependent, producing rain or shine. He prefers to fish near the base of drop-offs, often on the edge of the channel, though he sometimes catches his fish partly up the slope. And unlike many other types of structure fishing, Bondy says it's not as important to concentrate on specific elements (say turns in the river channel or points) as it is to just cover water. His theory is that these fish are on the move, not sitting still, and you should keep moving until your paths intersect.

Although he often continues to cast for muskies in early morning, Bondy sometimes takes his experienced clients right out to the jigging grounds. The hardest part of the experience, he says, is getting neophytes to buy into the technique.

"I get some strange looks sometimes at first," he said. "But they see."

For more information, check out Bondy's website at www.lakestclairfishing.com.

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