Deep Jigging the Electric Way

Regular readers of these pages know how much our crew enjoys deep dropping, at Brown’s Mountain. We’ve had some fantastic sessions out there:

For many years we’ve specialised in electric reels and deep drop rods, because manually winding up 20 kilo blue eye - or two 8 kilo gemfish - is no fun at all:

A lot of blokes who haven’t tried it think deep dropping with electric reels must be a piece of cake. Just drop your baits down, wait until the rod tip bounces, and press the up button. If only it was that easy! The real story is that all the usual challenges of fishing are magnified tenfold, in 400 metres of water. The wind, the current, and the incredibly rough bottom all present difficulties. So when I started hearing about the new techniques being pioneered by Sydney fisho Chris Chan I wanted to know more:

Chris is slow jigging out there, using regular rods and reels. And its delivering blue eye trevalla for him. Scroll to 3:30 for the best one:

The idea of working the lure manually, feeling the bite, striking, and fighting the fish to the surface appealed a lot. The part I didn’t like was, manually winding up the lure if I hadn’t got a bite by the end of the drift. The drift can often be quite short at Brown’s. So if we were constantly repositioning the boat, the endless winding would be a massive pain. Then I realised the answer was right in front of me, in the tackle cabinet:

The Dragon 7000 electric reel. Light – only 630 grams - 700 grams, including line. By comparison, the Penn Spinfisher 850 weighs 770 grams – without line. But not dramatically smaller than our Tanacom 750:

Big line capacity. I’ve put nearly 700 metres of 15 kilo colour change braid, on mine. I’m using one small lure only, so heavy line and big sinker not required. Using lighter line cuts the current drag too. Meaning your line stays much closer to vertical and you don’t have to to reverse the boat into the current so much. That’s a huge plus. And, auto retrieve cut out. I don’t want to be watching over the side so I can turn the retrieve off before the jig slams into - and damages – the rod tip. This reel has a cut out which stops retrieve when your jig is five metres down. Fantastic benefit, because you can press the up button and go do something else. So, reel and line selection sorted. What about the rod? We had just the thing. Our 24 kilo jig rod is ideal. Plenty of grunt and some massive kings have been caught on it. But still tippy, so you can detect bites and strikes. Lure selection is important. I started out with our 420 gram jigs:

See our current knife jigs

Then I realized that a big lumo SP probably way more likely to attract a strike, down in the inky blackness. And that a hook pointing upwards would reduce the risk of snagging the bottom, which is the number one problem at Browns. We had just the thing. Our 7 inch super lumo SP, on our spoon hook setup. These have such strong lumo you can literally read in the dark using one:

However! When I used this setup recently I got way too high a percentage of missed strikes and slashed lure tails. Solution? Move the hook towards the tail, using a Head Start:

Trying this setup – overhead rod, Dragon reel, PE 3 line, and lumo SP on a Head Start – at Browns this week. And will report back if it all works out the way I’m hoping. Last but not least, there is one more super important benefit with this combo – price. Here’s specs and pricing:

Dragon 7000 electric reel
Line capacity:
400 metres of PE5 or
650 metres of PE3 (we recommend PE3, for less resistance to the current)
Reel weight 630 grams, super light
Lifting power 22 kilos
Rod: Hercules 15-24 kilo 2-piece five foot six inch jigging rod
Can be shipped by post so, cheap delivery
Cost including rod, reel, your choice of line pre-spooled, leader and sample jig $850

Will report back as to how it all goes – good or bad. Thanks for reading
Andrew Hestelow

Also in Tackle News