After a spectacular day on the Red River last week, it wasn’t too difficult to convince fishing partner Jim Price to head out this past Thanksgiving Sunday for round two. This time when we arrived at Selkirk Park at 7:30 there were already twenty rigs parked in the lot. I guess the word was out that there was some green in the river. As we headed up river, we had decided to start with a trolling run back on the Miracle Mile in order to cover some water. A lot can be determined by this method, especially with good electronics. One thing that we did discover fairly quickly that the cold front that had brought snow and plummeting temperatures had also slowed the bite. This mean the trolling bite was off and the jig bite was on. There was also almost no current flow with a light southwest wind which just slows the bite right down. Still if you are willing to put your time in and look around fish can be caught.
THE JIG BITE: With the slow flow, there was absolutely no need to anchor. Jim put the back troll motor down on his boat and we worked outside turns and the edge of the river channel in ten to sixteen feet of water.
Jim Price likes to use as light a jig as possible, one just heavy enough that he can feel bottom. This lighter jig will allow fish in inhale the bait when they flare their gills on the bite. It does pay to experiment with size of the jig though. For colour either pink, orange or chartreuse are favourites. I like the jigs that have a large eye on them, which makes it easier for the walleye to target.
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| The jig bite pays off with some green and bonus crappie! |
In colder weather less movement of the jig is usually better while in warmer water a sharp snap and drop can be deadly. Both Jim and I love to fish a jig with a double twitch. By this I mean you let the jig drop to the bottom, use a sweep of your jigging rod to lift it about three feet off the bottom, then drop the jig again to the bottom and double twitch When choosing a jigging rod, I like a six and a half foot mode, with medium light action when fishing with monofilament line. When I fish deeper water with heavier current, it is much easier to detect bites with the use of no stretch lines. I have found the new NanoFil line made by Berkley to be the best of both worlds. It has absolutely no line memory combined with minimal stretch. These two qualities make it ideal for cold weather as the line always remains supple with no line twist! It is the first of the new Uni-Filament lines. Made out of gel-spun polyethylene, much like a superline, this spinning reel fishing line consists of hundreds of Dyneema nanofilaments that are molecularly linked and shaped into a unified filament fishing line.
