FISHING THE BUCKTAIL
Mastering Bucktails from Surf and Boat
By John Skinner
COPYRIGHT©2012. Surfcasting LLC
Smashwords Edition
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Other
Books by the Author
A SEASON ON THE EDGE
Other publications by SURFCASTING LLC
The Art of Surfcasting with Lures, by Zeno Hromin
The Hunt for Big Stripers, by Zeno Hromin
Surfcaster, by William Muller
Secrets of Surf Fishing at Night, by William Muller
Fishing the Bucktail, by John Skinner
DEDICATION
Dedicated to my kids, Katie and Mikey,
whose college tuition
bills inspired me to write this book.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks go out to my brother, Captain Bob Skinner, and his wife Marie for editing the manuscript. Bob’s homemade bucktails were an early influence in making me take careful notice of the relationship between bucktail construction and performance. Thanks to John Paduano for coming to my house with his custom bucktails of various styles. That was a nice contribution to the material in Chapter 2. Thank you to Mike Mapes for taking me to The Race in his boat on the night of the June 2011 Full Moon. The accounts and photos of that trip were fine additions to Chapter 10. Thanks to Captain George Grosselfinger, Charlie Mickaliger, and Captain Steven Redmond for taking me on their boats to the deep rips of Long Island’s North Fork many times in the early 1990’s. What I learned on those trips influenced how I bucktail from ocean inlet jetties. Finally, thanks to Zeno Hromin for the publishing support required to make this book a reality.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
10.THREE-WAY RIGS IN DEEP RIPS
11.LIGHT TACKLE FLUKE BUCKTAILING
CHAPTER 1
A BUCKTAIL PRIMER
An angler who has mastered the bucktail jig is well positioned for fishing success in many different settings. Just about any fish that will strike an artificial will take a bucktail. Equally as important, bucktails catch under a wide variety of conditions. From the pounding surf, to the placid back bays, to the ripping currents of ocean inlets, bucktail jigs can be presented in an effective manner.
At one level, bucktail fishing is simple. You need only to accomplish the following objective – swim the bucktail near the bottom on a slow to moderate retrieve. Do that in the presence of fish that are willing to feed, and you’ll catch some. It’s conceptually easy, but can be very challenging under many of the conditions we’re faced with in the marine environment. Take an ocean inlet as an example. The bucktail’s weight, bulk, retrieve speed, and cast placement are a subset of the variables involved when trying to achieve the objective. In reality, there’s a very narrow window of doing it right that lies somewhere between having the jig drag ineffectively through the sand, and having it blow by too high in the water column.
On rocky shorelines you’ll often observe accomplished bucktailers catching fish after fish while less experienced anglers lose their jigs in the rocks. Even on the more forgiving sand beaches it’s not uncommon to see a handful of fishermen hooked up constantly while many others watch in bewilderment or frustration. From my observations, that gap between the catches of the skilled bucktailer and the novice is significantly greater than what is seen when other types of lures are involved. Also, when considering the fish catching ability of bucktails, they’re underutilized by a large number of anglers. Why? I can think of a couple of reasons. They don’t cast far and, when the wrong weight is used, they’re prone to snagging bottom.
There’s a perception among many surf anglers that good casting distance is vital to success. Bucktails don’t cast very far in comparison to other lures. When an angler who lacks confidence in bucktails switches from something like a tin or an aerodynamic plug to a bucktail, casting distance is probably cut in half. If that jig isn’t grabbed in the first few casts, it often ends up right back in the surf bag, or worse, it’s exchanged for a heavier bucktail that casts further. Over a rocky bottom the result is often a snag followed by a lost jig. The bad experience only adds to the angler’s reluctance to give the bucktail a fair chance.
I said if you accomplished the objective stated previously in the presence of fish willing to eat, you’d catch some fish. I didn’t say that you will have maximized your fish catching potential, but let’s start with the simple objective and proceed from there. We’ll go on an imaginary trip to several different settings and work through the basics. Then we’ll take it to the next level and look at all of the details, techniques, and strategies that separate those bucktailers who seem to always be hooked up from those who are just scratching the surface of the jig’s productivity. We all probably learn best from experience, so I’ll also draw you into some of my past trips and share strategies that worked for me in various situations. In addition, we’ll move beyond the surf line and look at applying bucktails in different boat and kayak settings. While that may not sound interesting to a surfcaster, I know that some of what has made me a good inlet jetty fisherman came from dragging bucktails through deep water rips on a boat. The transfer of knowledge between boat and surf bucktailing has worked both ways for me in that I’m productive casting bucktails from my kayak because I had first mastered using bucktails from the beach.
Let’s consider a hypothetical day on an ocean sand beach with average surf conditions and get as many of the basics out of the way that we can. Before we even get to the beach, we have to gather some gear together. Let’s start with the jigs. If you walk into a well-stocked tackle shop and look at the bucktail section, you might be faced with a dizzying array of different brands, head styles, colors, and weights. No problem. We’ll cut right through that. If you have nothing else but white bucktails, you’ll be fine. Now for size. Remember, we’re heading to a typical ocean beach. First think about how deep the water is that you’ll be casting into. It’s unlikely to be more than 12 feet deep. You’ll probably be hitting something between 5 and 12 feet. Under reasonable conditions, anything more than 1 ½ ounces is going to be on the bottom with a slow to moderate retrieve. It’s hard to cast anything less than ¾ of an ounce. So there’s your weight range: ¾ to 1 ½ ounces. We’ve just eliminated the biggest mistake I see anglers make with respect to bucktailing – they choose the wrong size and usually err on the side of going too heavy. Head style? The most common all around head is the “Smiling Bill”, which is a rounded head jig with an open mouth. That’s a fine choice. Brand? If you see Blue Frog fixed hook jigs, those are the ones I’d buy. They have rounded heads similar to those on the Smiling Bill’s, minus the open mouth. Andrus Ripsplitters are good too. Depending on the shop, they might have their own store tied jigs. The people who run these shops are locals who know their stuff, so I’d bet that they make good jigs. In reality, any reasonably tied jig with a strong hook will do.
An Andrus Rip Splitter Smiling Bill and a Blue Frog Fixed Hook with a strip of #50 Uncle Josh pork rind.
Bucktails are usually fished with something hanging off the back, often referred to as a trailer. A jar of #50 white Uncle Josh pork rind is a good start. If you leave the store with that and 6 jigs, 2 each of ¾, 1, and 1 ½ ounces, you’ll have enough to get started.
Few lures come out of the package with razor sharp hooks, and bucktails are no exception. Unless you’ve bought one of the few brands of bucktails with chemically sharpened hooks (SPROs are one example), you should use a hook file to sharpen the hooks on your new jigs. I prefer the small hook files made by Luhr Jensen. With the exception of the jigs that I use in ocean inlets, I crush the hook barbs with a pair of pliers. As long as you maintain a bend in the rod, you will never lose a fish because your barb is crushed. You will, however, hook many more fish, and a higher percentage of large fish, because the hook with the crushed barb will penetrate much easier.
Let’s choose which rod to bring. Do you want to throw lures averaging 1 ounce with an 11-foot surf rod? I don’t, but it’s somewhat of a personal choice. I’ll be using my medium action 9-foot graphite. This is an open sand beach with plenty of room for a big fish to run should we get lucky and tie into a serious cow. Whichever outfit you choose, be sure that it’s spooled with braided line or FireLine, and I’ll elaborate on that later. Thirty-pound-test braid is a good choice for ocean sand beaches. I terminate the line with a roughly 36-inch leader of 50-pound-test fluorocarbon with a quality barrel swivel on one end and a Tactical Anglers clip on the other. These clips are important upgrades of the more traditional Duolock clips that had the vulnerability of opening up with fish on.
OK, we’re finally on the beach, and there are moderate 3-foot swells coming in on a slight angle from the left, but not much wind to speak of. You see that white water breaking on that bar a little ways down the beach? Let’s head in that direction, but we’ll make some casts along the way. The 1-ounce jig tipped with a strip of pork rind is a good starting point. Cast out as far as you can, aiming slightly to your left in the direction from which the waves are coming. You’re casting slightly to the side to compensate for the little bit of a sweep caused by the swells. By doing this, your jig won’t be way down the beach to your right when it gets near the shore. Start a slow to moderate retrieve as soon as the jig hits the water. A steady retrieve will work, but an occasional lift or twitch is a fine addition. Recall the objective of “swimming” the bucktail. Note that I wrote “swim” and not “bounce”. There are two sets of experiences that reinforce my belief that that the jig should be swimming or gliding along. You can read about some of this in Chapter 10, where I write about drifting bucktails through deep rips from a boat. It’s a method used by many pinhookers (commercial rod and reel fishermen) to load their boats with bass. My other impression has come from scuba diving. I get to observe all sorts of marine life and fish that bass feed on – small bergals, seabass, blackfish, flounder – they all swim or glide along. I’ve yet to see anything bouncing on the bottom, so the mostly steady swimming of the jig is a more natural presentation. The additional twitch or short lift could simulate a baitfish trying to flee, which may trigger a gamefish to strike while it can.
A nice feature of sandy bottoms is that you don’t have to worry about snagging your jig. If you occasionally swim deep and your jig collides with the little sand waves on the bottom, no problem. It may even be a good thing as sometimes fish might respond to the puffs of sand made by the collision of the jig with the bottom. When I scuba dive, I frequently see small fish move off the bottom in a puff of sand, so this too is quite natural.
When you’ve swam your jig to just behind the first wave nearest to the shore, pay extra close attention and do your best to keep the jig swimming through the turbulence. Increase your retrieve speed a bit when the bucktail is pushed by a wave, and slow it down when it’s being pulled into the undertow of a receding wave. There’s a narrow trough that runs along the beach behind that first wave and stripers love to swim along it. It’s often referred to as the lip. Maybe you’ve encountered it if you swim at the ocean. That lip is so productive that it’s often worth making diagonal casts along it. If you’re making straight casts and getting bumped in close, then making diagonal casts is even more important. This is when it pays to move to places with fewer anglers where you have the casting room to do this.
We’re at the bar now, and we can just about reach it. Watch the waves for a bit. Observe their timing. A few seconds before you expect a wave to break, make your cast so that your jig swims below the fleeting white water blanket that is produced by a breaking wave. The blanket will probably last less than 10 seconds, but it’s common for stripers to charge in under those blankets to feed and then retreat quickly to slightly deeper water when the blanket dissipates.
That’s it. You now have all of the basics you need to effectively bucktail an ocean beach under reasonable conditions. Your white bucktail and pork rind is a properly sized deadly fish producer, and it needs little more from you than to be pulled past the fish that are often in the white water and along the beach lip.
Let’s hit the back bay for a while. We’ll be fishing water that’s 3 to 5 feet deep and has a weak current. We’ll need a slightly lighter weight bucktail. One-half-ounce will do the job, and we’ll also bring the ¾-ounce jigs. The #50 pork rind is fine. My outfit is a 7-foot medium action graphite rod. My 20-pound-test braid is terminated with a 30-inch leader of 30-pound-test fluorocarbon with a small barrel swivel on one end and the smallest Tactical Anglers clip on the other. I’ve chosen a spot where a large cove narrows somewhat and drains into the bay. On outgoing water, the mouth of the cove is a natural ambush point for predators watching for bait being swept out of the cove. With the current moving left to right, lead the current slightly with your cast so that the jig doesn’t end up way downcurrent when it gets in close. It’s the same concept as leading the sweep on the beach. Begin and maintain a slow and mostly steady retrieve as soon as the jig hits the water. As the jig swings past your position and begins to be pulled into the current, drop your retrieve speed down to compensate for the force of the current on your jig. Given the shallow water, you can be assured that your jig is always in the near-bottom strike zone. That’s all there is to it. Again, the biggest mistake I see in this setting is that novice bucktailers will use a jig that’s too heavy. Maximizing your catch in a shallow bay setting can be deceptively challenging. Very small changes in your offering and retrieve can make a big difference. I’ll expand on that in Chapter 6.
Would you like to try an inlet? In some respects, it’s a super-sized version of our little bay effort, and the challenges are super-sized as well. The water is deeper than any you’re likely to cast into from an ocean beach. The current moves very fast at times, requiring jigs weighing as much as 5 ounces. If you do hook up, the fish is likely to be substantial and you’ll be fighting it against the strong current. You better be using a rod, reel, and line combination in tip top condition with a lot of stopping power. Want to land that fish? Be careful climbing down those weed covered rocks while waves are coming at you. If you’re the only one on the rocks and have room to make mistakes, you’re probably in the wrong spot or you’re there at the wrong time. There’s nothing simple about this kind of fishing. It’s not for everyone. I won’t attempt to trivialize any part of it at this introductory stage of the book; rather I’ll go into great detail in Chapter 5. Let’s skip the inlet for now and head for a rocky sound shore.
There’s just a slight onshore breeze now, barely a chop, and we have a mild current pulling from left to right. Did you notice I like going places with some water movement? Gamefish like current because they hold the advantage over their weaker prey in moving water, so we should take advantage of that as much as possible. This setting shares one aspect with the ocean sand beach that we started on. The water depth is about the same. We’ll be unlikely to hit anything deeper than 12 feet on the cast. This helps us choose the bucktail weight, but we have to go a little lighter in weight here because the bottom isn’t forgiving. It’s OK to tap the bottom on the sand beach, but do it here and there’s a good chance you’ll lose your jig. Let’s carry ½, ¾, and 1-ounce jigs, but we’ll probably spend most of the time with the ¾. I’m back to the 9-foot rod here. Lead the current ever so slightly and get the retrieve going soon after the jig hits the water. If you hit bottom, speed up a little. If you still hit bottom, drop back to a lighter weight jig. The biggest challenge bucktailing over a rocky bottom is swimming in the near-bottom strike zone at that slow to moderate retrieve without snagging. If you can do that, you’ll catch. If you can become competent fishing here, then with a few adjustments you’ll be able to get by in a more challenging rocky area, such as Montauk.
Montauk Point is a very diverse area. From Shagwong to the North Side bars, around to the South Side reefs that lead to the sand, Montauk presents a variety of settings and challenges. Shagwong is actually a sound beach with substantial current on the falling tide. You’ll probably fish 1- to 1 ½-ounce jigs here, dealing with the current as in the other locations. As you get closer to the lighthouse, the challenge will often be to work the bucktail through the relatively shallow water without hanging in the heavy bottom growth. What this area lacks in depth it makes up for in current, especially on the outgoing. Again, 1- to 1 ½-ounce jigs work well under most conditions. Fishing on the rocks beneath the lighthouse is often crowded with challenges similar to ocean inlet jetties, so I won’t address it here. The South Side reefs combine ocean waves, some current, and a cluttered bottom with lots of growth. The many points, edges, and coves that stretch for miles and are accessible only by walking provide one of the most rewarding settings for bucktailing. Jigs between ¾ and 1 ½ ounces will see most of the use here. Keep heading west, and you’re back to the sand beaches.
This little primer is a good start, a satisfactory foundation, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with bucktails. Next we’ll need to get a few things out of the way that will be prerequisites for what’s to follow.
FISHING THE BUCKTAIL
CHAPTER 2
BUCKTAIL
CHARACTERISTICS
The introductory primer intentionally glosses over the physical characteristics of a bucktail jig by claiming that a standard white off-the-shelf Smiling Bill style bucktail will suffice in many situations. Let’s go beyond this.
I’ve noticed that most discussions of the physical characteristics of bucktails often focus a lot on the head style. I’m going to take a different angle and focus on something I think is more important – how much and what kind of material is tied on the jig head. This is about bulk and profile. Certainly deer hair is the biggest component of what’s wrapped on the leadhead, so let’s start there. The amount of deer hair that’s tied on the jig is crucial. Consider a pair of nearly identical 1-ounce bucktails. They have the same everything, except one has significantly more hair than the other. These may be the same brand purchased on the same day from the same store. Maybe they came out of the package that way. These are often hand tied lures relying on a human to determine how much hair to add. Maybe they were nearly identical when new, but the sharp teeth of bluefish have thinned one out. Maybe they’re homemade and intentionally tied with different amounts of hair. Whatever the reason, these are two entirely different lures.
Deer hair is hollow. Throw a few strands in the water and what do you notice? It floats. The more hair, the more air, the more buoyancy. The densely tied jig is going to have more “float” because of this. A densely tied jig will also have more drag in the water. This alone will cause it to sink more slowly in the water than a sparsely tied jig, but remember that the sink rate will also be slower because of all of the air trapped inside the hair. Because of bulk and float, that densely tied jig will sink slower and swim higher in the water column. View a densely tied jig from the side and it has a wide profile not unlike that of a bunker. Look at it from the top or bottom and it is thicker than its sparsely tied counterpart. So the dense bucktail is a broader-profiled offering with a slower sink rate that swims higher in the water column than the thin jig. Does that make it better? It depends on the circumstances. If I’m casting into relatively shallow water over a rocky bottom and the fish are feeding on peanut bunker, I probably want that dense jig. I say “probably” because although that dense jig will do a better job of staying above the snags and matching the profile of the bait, none of that will help me if I can’t cast that bulky jig far enough to reach the fish. There’s the tradeoff. All of that extra hair makes the lure less aerodynamic, and therefore it won’t cast as far. Likewise, if I’m in a boat or kayak and I have to get the jig down 20 feet to reach the fish, I’ll need to take hair density into account to judge how long to let the jig sink and at what speed to retrieve it.
A pair of ¾-ounce Blue Frogs. Note the difference in hair density.
Otherwise identical jigs that differ significantly in hair density are indeed very different lures. If I need distance, I’ll grab the sparse jig. If distance isn’t an issue but I need to swim over a cluttered bottom, I’ll go for the dense jig. If you tie your own jigs, which I’ll address in Chapter 12, it’s easy to intentionally tie with some variation. But what if you’re buying everything off-the-shelf? As it turns out, there will still be a fair amount of variation in store-bought jigs because the deer hair itself varies so much and tying the jigs is not a very precise task. When you buy from your local shop, you can cull through the jigs to get some different hair density. With shops that tie their own, it may even be possible to do some special ordering. It also wouldn’t take much effort to buy a couple of deer tails and add hair yourself. This is a good practice because it can help you refurbish jigs that have been torn up by bluefish or other toothy species. An easy way to bulk out some jigs is to add hackle feathers to the hook shanks. I tie some of my own jigs this way because I like the way the feathers fill out the body of the jig and add a little length.
I trivialized bucktail colors in the primer chapter. While it’s true that white is often an excellent bucktail color choice, and that you can “get away with it” in many circumstances, moving to the next level requires some thought about colors. It’s easy to get carried away with colors, as is sometimes done by plug manufacturers who offer 20 different colors of the same lure. Let’s not go quite that far.
My first serious impression with color came in the early 1990’s while dragging bucktails from boats through the deep rips east of Orient Point. Some of the better charter captains there were doing very well with a wine red color when fishing at night. When I finally got my hands on one of these somewhat hard to find color jigs (we caught one), it was clear that the big stripers of the Fisher’s Island Race, Sluiceway, and Plum Gut were showing a definite preference. It was easy to tell because we’d have only one guy in the boat try the new color and then change who used it and there was no question that the fish reacted to it better. Other colors we were using at the time included black, so it wasn’t just a matter of the jig being dark in color. I quickly applied this to my nighttime inlet jetty fishing on Long Island’s South Shore and it soon became my favorite night color. The other color I’ve seen make a difference is fluorescent green. I’ve seen it outfish other colors during the day in deep rips and at times when the water was a little tinged. There’s no mystery why, as the color stands out better in deep or murky water.
My basement is loaded with bucktails of varying colors, but if you look at what I’m carrying when out on the water you’ll usually find I have only two different colors. I like white or chartreuse during the day, and white or wine red at night. I think the best substitution for wine red is black. There are some practical purposes for limiting the number of colors I carry. When I fish an inlet, I carry at least five different weights. If I carry those weights in two different colors and have one spare of each, that’s already 20 jigs. You can see how the numbers can get out of hand by trying to carry several colors. Besides, you can also tweak the color of your bucktail offerings with different color trailers.
Popular pork rind strips. From left to right, sizes 50, 240, 70, and 56.
With the exception of some specialty jigs that I’ll mention in a moment, trailers are almost always used on bucktails. My preference is for the pork strips made by Uncle Josh, but I’m never without a few soft plastic grub tails. I like pork because it looks natural in the water and is very durable. The reason it looks natural is because it is natural. Drop it in the water and it will sink at about the same rate as a strip of fish. It’s tough stuff that stands up great to the worst of the toothy predators. There are more colors than I care to consider, and there’s a nice variety of sizes and styles.
Varying your jig trailers is a great way to adjust the buoyancy and profile of your bucktail. Where added hair provided a wider profile, the addition of a pork strip can increase length. A wider pork strip can be used to make the jig swim a little higher. One of my favorite pork trailers is the Uncle Josh #50, 4 ½- by ¼-inch strip. I like this strip because its relatively small profile does not create a lot of air drag on the cast, so it does not cut much into casting distance. It is still sufficiently long to add enough flutter to the end of a bucktail to trigger fish to strike. If I want to increase the size of the profile and add some length, I’ll go to the #70 5 ¼ by 5/8-inch strip. Another nice trailer is the 240S, which is a 5- by 3/8-inch split tail. When I fish larger 2- to 5-ounce jigs in ocean inlets, I go up to the #56, 6-inch strip. The #57 7-inch strip is excellent for the three-way rig bucktailing described in Chapter 10. Red and white are great all-around colors for pork trailers. I also like chartreuse to add a touch of extra visibility to a white jig.
Soft plastic grubs make excellent bucktail trailers.
There are many styles of soft plastics on the market that make good bucktail trailers. I always carry a few grub tails with me in different colors and sizes. Because most soft plastics float, the addition of one to a bucktail is a great way to increase the buoyancy of the jig. They’re also convenient to carry, and the wide range of colors makes it easy to experiment. The Berkley Gulp Alive baits also make excellent bucktail trailers. I’ll tip small bucktails with Gulp worms to coax early spring stripers to hit. When bucktailing for fluke, I use Berkeley Gulp Alive grubs almost exclusively, and choose it over real bait because of its convenience and effectiveness. Fish eat Gulp Alive as if it were real food. I’ve taken some underwater video of porgies devouring Gulp grubs.
There are two styles of bucktails that differ in the way the hook is attached. The more traditional is the fixed hook jig, where the hook is embedded in the leadhead. The second is the swing hook jig where the hook is attached to an eye on the back of the leadhead. Most off-the-shelf bucktails are fixed-hook models. Many stores that sell bucktails carry only these. Some anglers who prefer swing hooks say the jigs have better action and fish have less leverage to shake the hook free. If swing hook jigs do have better action than fixed hook models, this can only pertain to the trailer because the hair is still fixed firmly to the jig head. Does an undulating pork strip undulate more on a swing hook? Maybe. As for swing hooks losing less fish, I have trouble with this claim. I prefer fixed hook jigs because my experience fishing fixed vs. swing on ocean inlet jetties with generally large fish made the impression that the hooksets were better and I missed less fish with fixed hooks. This makes sense to me. When I lean back on a fish with a swing hook jig, there’s substantial freedom of movement where the hook is attached to the jig. This is the “swing” part. Given a choice, I don’t want that freedom of movement when I’m trying to bury the hook. I want a firm and direct force applied to that hook point. As for losing less fish that are already hooked, I can’t imagine a lure that loses less fish than a traditional fixed hook jig head. I crush the barbs on most of my bucktails and it’s very rare that I lose a fish. If anything, I would think that a head shaking fish could bounce the leadhead from side to side on a swing hook jig, potentially working the hook free, whereas the leadhead has no freedom of movement to accomplish this with a fixed hook.