August 08, 2012
By Ned Kehde
On March 17, we posted a blog about the new wacky jig that Shinichi Fukae of Osaka, Japan and Palestine, Texas, helped Gamakatsu create for American waterways. At that time the prototype name was G-Finesse Series Jighead Wacky. We noted that it would be available for anglers to purchase in mid-May.
Now it's simply called the Wacky Head, and it is available at a variety tackle venue.
It features a titanium V-shaped weed guard, which have perfect stiffness, lengths and angles. The guard also retains its correct positioning throughout the day, and it makes the jig amazingly weedless.
The head of this jig has a unique taper with a recessed hook eye. The heads are painted either green pumpkin or matte black.
The hook is a 1/0 EWG Gamakatsu that Fukae designed. He designed it so that it would keep a soft-plastic bait perfectly positioned on the hook. What's more, this hook also facilitates better hooksets than anglers normally have experienced with other wacky jigs.
Traditionally, wacky-rigged worms and Senko-style baits are fragile and difficult to keep on the hook. Consequently anglers can rarely catch more than two bass per bait, and often after one significant donnybrook with a bass, the soft-plastic bait is virtually annihilated. But the design of Fukae's jig, weed guard and hook also helps to keep some soft-plastic worms from being quickly destroyed and tossed off the hook by a cantankerous largemouth or smallmouth bass.
In fact, during the last week of July and first week of August, we took some of our kids and grandkids on our annual vacation to a small eutrophic lake in Itasca County, Minnesota, where the largemouth bass and smallmouth bass fishing is usually trying, and where a wacky worm on a jig is often the best option for many members of our family to employ.
This was the first time that we had seen Fukae's Wacky Jig in action, and we were impressed by how it preserved the soft-plastic worms that we used. We were equally impressed with its ability to allure this lake's tentative and allusive largemouth bass.
We dressed our 1/16-ounce Wacky Head jigs with a either a green pumpkin or watermelon/red Z-Man Fishing Products' four-inch Finesse WormZ. The photograph at the top of this blog features the Wacky Jig rigged with a watermelon/red Finesse WormZ.
One of these combos tangled with 25 largemouth bass, two smallmouth bass and three northern pike. In sum, the same watermelon/red Finesse WormZ caught all 28 of these species, and it looks as if it possesses the wherewithal to catch 28 more.
During the entire vacation, we lost only three Finesse WormZs. One loss occurred when a northern pike's teeth cut the line and completely liberated the jig and worm from one of our spinning outfits. We lost one when we made an errant cast into an extremely thick wad of lily pads, which allowed a big largemouth bass to wrap our eight-pound-test line around a wad of water lily stems and eventually break the line, and we lost another one from a misplaced cast into the heart of a fallen tamarack tree, where a nice-sized largemouth bass engulfed the bait and wrapped the line around a quagmire of tamarack branches and ultimately broke the line.
We use a wacky-rigged jig only when the fishing is trying. In the past, when we used other types of wacky jigs, we rarely caught six or seven bass before a Finesse WormZ was torn off the hook.
In addition to its ability to preserve our soft-plastic baits, it proved to be an exceptionally snag-free jig, and we were presenting them around and into patches of lily pads, reeds, wild rice, cattails, as well as a labyrinth of branches associated with tamarack trees and a variety of submergent vegetation.
If we can keep northern pike from cutting our lines and big largemouth bass from wrapping our lines around tree branches and lily pad stems, Fukae's Wacky Head looks to be virtually indestructible. And when it is combined with a Z-Man's four-inch Finesse WormZ or Hula StickZ, it is the most durable and alluring wacky-rig combo that we have ever seen.
It's made in four sizes: 1/16-ounce,1/8-ounce, 3/32-ounce and 3/16-ounce.
Finesse anglers can purchase a package of three 1/16-ounce jigs for $6.49.
For more information about Fukae's wizardry with a wacky jig, please see this blog http://www.in-fisherman.com/2011/11/05/the-wacky-jig/#idc-container
