Anybody out there have a good technique on fishing ice jigs
for winter Castaic largemouths?  

skeeter8

Yeah two guys....Hart and Zank.

Gotcha!!

skeeter8

I'm not very good at it but I will drop down to where the
marks on the graf are and give the jigs very short pops...2 or
3 inches. 

>Yeah two guys....Hart and Zank.

HAHAHAHA!!! Yeah they know how to use them. 

I played with ice jigs a fair amount last year at Nacimiento. It's sort of a perplexing lure. The conventional wisdom is to short pop them like Shane said but what worked for me was a much more aggressive jigging motion. Snapping the lure up 3 to 6 feet then throwing slack in the line to let it fall.

At naci last year there were a lot of fish way out in open water under birds. I'd run out there and graph until I saw fish (looks like spaghetti on the screen when you get over the meat). Then quickly stop the boat and drop straight down under the cone of the transducer.

It was all visual fishing on the graph, you'd see fish break from the school and come up toward the ice jig and know you were about to be bit. Setting the screen refresh on your fish finder to maximum setting is mandatory. The newer Lowrance units are great for this.

When the fish are gone from the screen it's time to move. The beauty of the ice jig is the speed that you can get the lure down to fish on the screen. Regular spoons just don't sink that fast. I had best luck on 1/2oz black/silver Rapala ice jigs with 12lb fluorocarbon. Hope that helps.

Thanks for the feedback. It does help.

skeeter8