Ultralight Jigging

I am a first-generation fisherman, and Jim Rizzuto’s FISHING Hawaiian Style® was the textbook for my FSL (fishing as a second language) class. There were no anglers in my family, and no one ever put a rod in my hand; but somehow, before I made my very first cast, I found a copy of that book at the Kaimuki Library. Though my general position at age 10 was not pro-reading, there was something about that book that grabbed me and had me sitting on the floor of the adult section, riveted for hours. Many years later, after the book had motivated me to actually start fishing, Jim’s section on deep-jigging using soft plastics stuck in my mind and became the subject of an unusual amount of rumination. If this technique worked so well on the bottom away from shore, why wouldn’t it work in the lower water column closer to shore?

The problem I immediately found was that the small jigheads with plastic I used with my ultralight gear wouldn’t get down low. If they did, even slow retrieves would quickly bring them too close to the surface. The Japanese fishing culture swept in to save the day with the invention of ultralight jigging. This