Triggering fussy Lakers on Lake George: Top 5 Presentations to Get Fish to Commit
I can see piles of fish on my Garmin GPSMap 7610. I drop down on them and nothing. For whatever reason that happens to me all the time on Lake George. And up until last year, I didn’t have a strategy for triggering neutral to negative fish into biting. I’m going to give you my top five jigging techniques to get fish to commit:
Rip on a slack line. Drop to the bottom. You start ripping the bait off the bottom but you drop the rod tip just a bit before you snap your rod up. By doing this, you get a much more exaggerated motion.
Touch bottom and lift. This presentation is a larger lift of 3-10 feet. I have seen fish shoot up and hit a bait lifted high off the bottom.
Take it away from them. With this presentation, I make about 3 cranks on the reel and two or three exaggerated rips. I’m trying to imitate a smelt escaping from the jaws of a pursuing laker. I will do this 50-75 feet off the bottom. Sometimes fish will come in from the general area and attack the bait.
Just start reeling the bait off the bottom. I can’t tell you how many fish we catch doing this. It’s crazy, but you simply start reeling at a steady pace off the bottom. Again, I can think of fish I caught this year that didn’t commit until they were 30 feet down over 100 feet of water.
Make a cast and snap jig that bait back to the boat. Again, I am replaying fish I caught making a monster cast fishing in 80-120 fow and allowing the bait to hit the bottom and snapping jigging it all the way back to the boat. To break this down, I make sure I have bottom contact after every snap of the rod. I start at 9:00 with my rod placement and snap it up to 11 of 11:30 and then I reel a couple of cranks, picking up the line I just snapped. I want to keep tension in the line because the fish often bite as the bait is falling to the bottom. Most of the time I will use the bottom as my starting point, but sometimes I will start snapping a bit off the bottom.
That’s just the beginning of learning to jig lakers. But I will say that, in my opinion, jigging is way more enjoyable than trolling. And these fish can be successfully caught on light tackle with some sort of vertical jigging application! To learn more, try booking a trip next summer. Stay tuned for my articles to come!