Denny Brauer's scaled-down jig tricks

 
The finesse jig craze has just about every bass angler pitching a tiny jig to bass hideouts nowadays.

Even Denny Brauer, a master of flipping and pitching with bulky jigs and heavy tackle, resorts to the diminutive jig when he encounters gin-clear water conditions. However, Brauer has a different theory on downsizing when it comes to jig selection. Some anglers will start with a conventional jig for pitching and flipping and then downsize to a finesse jig for fishing the same body of water. Rather than switch to a finesse model though, Brauer usually sticks with his 1/2- or 3/8-ounce jigs and scales down his flipping tactics by making alterations to the lure and trailer.

The Missouri angler believes problems arise when switching from a standard-size jig to a finesse version.

“You are making sacrifices just to get a smaller profile bait, and those sacrifices usually get an angler in trouble,” he said.

The finesse models usually are equipped with a lighter wire hook, which could bend when trying to winch a fish out of heavy cover. Anglers also lose some feel for the smaller, lighter jig, which makes it harder to detect bites.  

“I have so much confidence that the jig I am using is perfect size-wise and there is a reason I start with that jig,” said Brauer of his preference for a conventional style jig. “Then if I want to figure out how to get more strikes on it, I try to change the look and the profile of the bait. That’s the easiest way for me to downsize.”

Downsizing is a fact of life for Brauer on the tournament trail. He recalls numerous times when he has scaled down on his jig because of heavy fishing pressure, or the fishery contained smaller bass.

“Some places we go every year I have to do that in order to get bites on the jig. An example would be a river system where I still want to use a crawdad imitator like a jig, and I know there are a lot of 2 1/2-pound fish there so I am going to have to present a smaller profile bait. In a tournament scenario it may also be a deal where I am catching them on a full-sized bait the first couple of days, and then I have to downsize the bait as the bite gets tougher and tougher.”

Cold water also prompts Brauer to slightly downsize his jig.  

“When it gets real cold, you don’t want to downsize too much because it can actually make a bait fall faster,” he warned.

Brauer’s definition of downsizing probably differs from some other anglers who pitch and flip.

“Most of the time I am not downsizing the weight of the bait or the bait itself,” he says. “I am downsizing the profile of it.”

One way he scales down on his lure is switching to a smaller trailer. If he starts with a magnum-sized plastic chunk, he might pair his jig with a regular or small-sized chunk to create a smaller profile. When he uses a craw worm on the back of his jig, Brauer shortens the soft plastic to where the hook comes out of the craw’s nose. Sticking a full size craw worm on a jig could lead to short strikes since the craw’s pincers stick out too far away from the jig’s hook.

Shortening the skirt of the jig is another trick Brauer performs to shrink his lure. Whenever he takes a new jig out of the package, he usually trims the skirt with a rainbow-shaped cut about 1/2 inch behind the hook bend. If he feels he has to downsize more, the former Bassmaster Classic champ trims the skirt even with the bend of the hook. 

“Very seldom do I go much shorter than that, I still want enough skirt to cover that hook, but really no more than that.”

Another way Brauer slims down his jig is to remove strands from the lure’s skirt. The number of strands he takes out depends on how skinny he wants his jig to look.

“There have been times I have taken almost half of them out to where I have a pretty sparse skirt (with just enough strands to cover the hook and rattle).”

By using a trimmed down version of his conventional flipping and pitching jig, Brauer never has to downsize his tackle. Water conditions and the type of cover he is fishing determine the line size Brauer employs. If he is targeting matted vegetation or flipping in muddy water, the Missouri pro will flip with 60-pound braided line. He opts for 25-pound test for flipping to heavy cover and 20-pound test for pitching to sparse cover or isolated docks. For casting situations in clear water, he scales down to 12- or 14-pound test.

The B.A.S.S. veteran relies on a 7 1/2-foot rod for flipping, but uses a 7-foot, 3-inch model for casting. The action on both rods are similar but the shorter rod has less power on the hookset, which prevents Brauer from breaking the lighter line he has to use in casting situations.

No matter how much he downsizes his jig, Brauer still bases his lure presentation on water temperature and the mood of the fish.

“The major mistake anglers make is that they get locked in to robot-type fishing. Every change they make to the bait is great but they still fish the bait the same. They never experiment with whether it needs to be swimming, hopping, crawling or swept off the bottom or whatever, they just fish the jig the same way day after day.”