Fishing for bass in deep water intimidates many anglers and it’s totally understandable. It’s not uncommon to spend hours and days locating suitable bass schools and when you find ’em, the fun really begins—you have to figure out how to catch ’em. It can be a bunch of work.
In my opinion, sensitivity is the most important aspect of deep water bass fishing. With so much line between you and the fish, you have to be able to feel what’s going on down there. For the last few months I’ve been using the Keitech Tungsten Model II Football Jig and it has made my deep bass fishing endeavors much, much easier
Here’s what I really like about it:
- Sensitive
- Compact
- Durable skirt
- Great weed guard
Outstanding sensitivity
As I’ve already discussed, you really need to be in-tune to what your bait is doing when fishing deep structure. Even the smallest hard spots, stumps or depth changes can be vital to your success and if you can’t feel that stuff, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
The Keitech Tungsten Model II Football Jig has a tungsten compound head, which offers several benefits to anglers. Tungsten is much harder and denser than traditional lead, which allows this jig to have a smaller head size and excellent sensitivity.
- Small head size—When you’re fishing deep brush piles, stump-covered bars and other types of gnarly structure, larger jig heads can actually be a bad thing. The larger your head, the more likely it is to become snagged in deep water. This specific jig head actually weighs in at 1/2-ounce, but it’s extremely small. You’re able to get down to deeper depths quickly and work it through limbs and branches without hang-ups and line breakage. Not to mention, its compact size is also advantageous when fishing for pressured schools of fish. Bulky presentations can spook wary bass, but this jig has proven excellent in tough fishing conditions.
- Hard, dense head—The increased density of tungsten allows you to feel even the smallest bumps, taps and changes in bottom composition regardless of the depth you’re fishing. Traditional lead heads are fairly soft, resulting in drastically decreased sensitivity transfer. When you’re targeting deep bass, the bites often feel mushy or spongy and this jig will transfers the energy to your line and rod tip excellently. I’ve only missed a few fish on this jig because there’s never any question when I get a bite.
Compact
I briefly touched on this in the above section, but we’ll go a little more in-depth now. You often hear of anglers complaining about hot jig bites seemingly disappearing overnight. I believe bass will bite larger jigs very well when they’re aggressively feeding, but when conditions change such as during post-frontal conditions, the larger, more imposing profile doesn’t appeal to them as much. This is when a lot of folks will pick up a shaky head and finesse worm to get some extra bites.
You can definitely catch big bass on shaky heads—I’ve done it a bunch—but you often have to weed through some smaller fish before getting those quality bites. With the Keitech Tungsten Model II Football Jig, I feel like I haven’t needed to sacrifice quality when fishing for lethargic bass. Although compact, it still maintains a profile large enough to attract your bigger bites. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many 3 to 5-pound fish it has produced for me.
Durable skirt
It’s irritating to spend four or five bucks on a jig only to have its skirt unravel after a few aggressive strikes or wild fish fights. You can pull on the individual skirt strands to even them out a few times, but eventually those strands will break and render the jig useless.
The Keitech Tungsten Modell II Football Jig’s skirt has one hundred strands and most importantly, it’s hand-tied. This means you don’t have to deal with some cheap rubber band sliding down the shank of the hook and unraveling your skirt. These rubber bands will often dry rot after a few weeks of use and crumble to pieces. I’ve caught a bunch of bass on this jig and had some ridiculously hard bites and the skirt hasn’t budged—it still looks like the day I got it.
I also love the action of this skirt. It’s produced using Keitech’s exclusive SR-40 silicone, so it has outstanding movement even with very little rod movement. I’ve caught some good bass dead-sticking this jig and I attribute it to the fact that the skirt sways and undulates very naturally with the natural flow of the water.
Effective weed guard
A jig’s weed guard is super important. Because they’re made to be put into some precarious places, a jig has to have a well-constructed weed guard to avoid snags and hang-ups. This jig’s weed guard has been great and has made my life easy when fishing deep water.
It’s not too stiff, so it’s not going to cost you any hookups. The fish won’t have any problem compressing the guard to get to the hook, so you’ll enjoy a solid hookup ratio with it. More importantly, the weed guard isn’t too soft as to cost hang-ups in deep cover. I’ve put this thing through a bunch of brush piles and haven’t lost it yet.
The weed guard is also hand-glued, which assures it will be directly in-line with the hook point. A lot of jigs out there have guards that are a little lopsided which, of course, drastically decrease their effectiveness.
Whether you’re learning to fish in deep water or if you’re an offshore enthusiast, I really think you’ll enjoy fishing with this jig. It has helped me catch a bunch of bass so far and I can’t wait to keep fishing with it this summer.
The Keitech Tungsten Model II Football Jig is available at TackleWarehouse.com.
