Five tips for picking jig heads 

However, even the best soft plastic lures are essentially useless without the addition of a hook and, in most instances, some weight to allow longer casts to carry the lure down through the water column to the fish.

There are many ways of achieving these goals. Some soft plastics come pre-rigged with integrated, internal weights and built-in hooks. However, most serious users prefer the flexibility (and economy) of a modular system by mixing and matching their own tails, hooks and weights to suit changing conditions, and by far the most common and popular ‘presentation vehicle’ for rigging soft plastics in Australian conditions is the humble jig head.

A jig head is a hook incorporated into a sinker or weight. Within that broad definition, there’s an incredible array of possibilities in terms of hook gauge and size, head shape, weight, density, construction material and keeper set-up.

The most popular jig heads consist of a straight-shanked, round-bend, Aberdeen-style hook with an unpainted or painted spherical head made of lead alloy. These jigs are built on purpose-made jig hooks that have a 60 to 90-degree bend in the shank near the hook eye. 

Choosing the best jig head can dramatically improve your catch rates. Here are five factors to bear in mind:

Matching the hook size (length and gape) to soft plastics is mostly common sense. Hooks that are too big or too small for a particular tail simply look wrong and don’t work well.

There’s a degree of flexibility, but the gape of the hook needs to be wide enough to allow easy rigging of the plastic and provide good point exposure – but not so large that it throws the lure out of whack or makes it look unnatural and unbalanced.

To catch big, powerful fish living in snag-strewn or reefy waters calls for heavy-gauge, extra-strong jig hooks. There’s a price to pay for this, as extra force is needed to drive such a thick hook into a fish’s jaw.

By contrast, if you’re targeting smaller fish in open water, you can choose a jig built on a very fine, light-gauge hook.

Head weights and sink rates influence ‘hang time’. In other words, the period a lure spends falling through a particular strike zone.

Increasing hang time can increase strikes in many situations. As a rule of thumb, choose the lightest jig head weight you can get by with, but not one so light that it fails to get down to where the fish are! Current strength and water depth play critical roles in this.

Beyond the basic round and bullet-head jigs, which suit so many common fishing styles, there are other shapes worth considering.

One of the most useful is the so-called darter-style jig, with its pointed nose and (often) a ‘keeled’ underside. When worked with a series of short, sharp rod tip flicks, this head (more than any other design) ducks and darts from side-to-side in an erratic manner that can be a fishy turn-on in many situations.

Most jig heads have some form of holding device or ‘keeper’ to secure the plastic tail snugly against the head. These vary from thick, ridged collars to barbs of various styles.

Large or aggressively shaped keepers can tear, deform or destroy the noses of thinner-profile plastics, especially if the plastic is pulled off the keeper and re-seated a few times.

Finer barbs or wire prongs work better with these tails. However, don’t be afraid to add a drop of Supa Glu to keep your tail in place.