One of the techniques that has gained enormous popularity in the past several years is throwing a swimbait. For most anglers, the easiest, most effective way to do this is to get the solid body, boot tail version, put it on a jighead, throw it out and let the lure do the work.
It’s an easy way to present a natural looking lure and it catches fish year round. Of course, one of the components you’ll have to decide on is which jighead to use with which swim bait.
Swimbaits come in a myriad of sizes, shapes and colors with the average size being about four inches, give or take. This size can represent bluegill, sunfish, shad, alewife or many other species so most manufacturers of soft plastics have their own version.
Given that you’re using something in this ball park, now you’ve got to decide which head to use. One of our favorites is the Z-Man Weedless Eye Jigheads.
These come in three weights, 1/8, 3/16, and 1/4. They feature an oversized eye for easy targeting by predatory fish, a custom wire weedguard that works simply, a double barbed keeper and a Mustad Ultra Point Hook on the business end.
All you have to do is thread your favorite soft plastic swimbait onto the hook, push it snug to the head, push the weedguard in place on the hook point and you’re ready to fish. There isn’t any more to getting this rig set up to begin fishing.
Before we go any further, we of course have our favorite plastics to rig on the Z-Man but, the purpose of this review is not to rank the baits, rather it is to focus on the Weedless Eye Jig. With that in mind, we’ll keep our attention on it because this product will accommodate most of the boot tail swimbaits out there.
Swimbait Action Full Send
The beauty of the Weedless Eye Jig is that its head design doesn’t detract in the slightest from your swimbaits action. The stream lined shape allows your bait to kick, roll or do whatever else it does without impeding it but still provides the solid platform to help a bait go in and around the types of cover or vegetation where fish like to hang out to ambush their prey.
With the weedguard on the jighead, you get the best of both worlds in terms of having the hook point exposed which increases hook up ratio while allowing it to be fished where a non weedless version can’t. Yes, you can use a belly weighted hook and tex-pose the hook point but that does decrease your hook up ratio due to the fact that, on the set, the hook has to travel through some plastic to penetrate the fishes mouth whereas an exposed hook doesn’t. Hey, just keepin’ it real.
Looking at the Z-Man head on, you notice the attention brought to bear in keeping it narrow so that it slips through vegetation easily while still protecting the head of the bait that you’re using so that it doesn’t slip down the hook shank. Furthermore, line tie helps shed some of the potential snags.
With the head and keeper molded as one piece, the weight distribution is ideal so that your bait moves naturally on a horizontal plane on the retrieve. We’ve mentioned that we’ve used several swimbaits from different manufacturers just for the purpose of seeing whether or not we could find one that would blow out the head. We’re happy to report that we haven’t found one and the Weedless Eye Jig has been equally functional with all of them.
For the majority of baits that we’ve paired with this jighead, it required no more than being aware of the sink rate with that lure, counting it down to the desired depth then adjusting your retrieve speed so that you get the most action from the bait.
Some swimbaits have a sweet spot in which their action is more pronounced at certain speeds. This jighead hasn’t changed that so it’s up to the angler to find that speed for the specific bait.
Weedless Eye Jig Construction
The weedguard is metal, molded into the head and runs through the line tie. While we were a little skeptical about this at first, thinking that it would interfere with tying our line, it hasn’t. Yes, you have to be a little more attentive but not much. It is the proverbial nothing burger.
It has held up quite well for us. As a matter of fact, none of them have broken off or been damaged to the point where they were useless and we have caught lots of fish on each individual jighead and I mean a ton.
We have experimented by adding small blades to the Jighead for added flash, this again is an easy modification but far from necessary. We’ve caught more fish by using it bone stock than tweaking it in any way.
This is one of those products that produces so well and so consistently while being so easy to use that it is on the top of our list to give to beginner anglers when we take them out. They don’t have to worry about having to impart action on the bait or getting hung due to too many hook points hanging off the bait. Basically, you can fish it just by chunkin’ and windin’.
The Weedless Eye Jighead is an extremely well thought out and executed piece of terminal tackle that has become a regular part of our starting line up.
On the MVF rating scale, the Z-Man Weedless Eye Jighead earns 4.5 stars.
See ya’ on the water …