I thought I would share with you guys something that I tried out on the Zambezi last week at Barotse Tiger Camp with great success.
I had been thinking about catching tigers on dropshot for a while. I had caught quite a few in the past, with a stinger hook trailing behind the dropshot, but it wasn't ideal, as the stinger hook often tangled up with my trace, or got snagged in the plastic. The main issue here is that a normal jighead doesn't work well with tigers for two reasons. Firstly the tiger often hits the lure behind the hook, and secondly if you do get a hookup it is for a very short time, as the tiger quickly throws the hook due to the weight of the jighead.
I wanted to place the hook further back in the plastic, and not have it directly on the weight, so that the fish had less leverage to shake the hook when he shakes his head.
I used an improvised bait needle, made from a piece of heavy piano wire to thread a piece of soft, wire through the plastic. I inserted the point of the needle into the soft plastic at the back, where I wanted the shank of the hook to be and pushed it through up to just behind the head, then pulled the soft wire through. I then tied a 4/0 VMC Siwash hook onto the soft wire and pulled it into the plastic. The large eye on the hook keep it from turning and holds it straight. I then cut the hook off a jig head, just behind the keeper and pushed the keeper into the nose of the plastic. Then tied the end of the soft wire to the eye of the jighead, simply using a series of half hitches. Below is a pic of the finished item.
This then gave me a dropshot rigged with the hook further back in the plastic, and not directly attached to the hook, meaning that the fish would not have as much leverage from the weight of the jighead when it jumped and shook its head.
This lure was what we used when the fishing got slow during the middle of the day, when the bigger tigers had retired to the deeper dropoffs in the middle of the river. It was great in that it got down, and could be bounced along the bottom, and over the dropoffs. The tiger smashed these dropshots and our hookup and landing rate was very good indeed!
One fish would invariably destroy the lure, and a new one would need to be made each time, re-using the jighead and the hook, and a new piece of wire and a new plastic. With practise I was getting quite quick at making them though, so it wasn't a huge mission.
Above is a pic of one of the tigers we caught with this setup. Below is a close up of another, showing the jighead and wire in place.
This setup is something that works, and could be prepared for beforehand by rigging a number of soft plastics with the soft wire already pulled through, so that a hook just needs to be tied on and a jighead inserted. This would make it quicker on the boat.
The materials that I used were: Bimini Jigheads, Explorer knottable wire, VMC Siwash hooks and McArthy softbaits. The softbaits that we used were in the orange colour shown above and the Orca colour (black above and pearl below) both worked very well. I like the McArthy plastics as they have enough toughness to grip properly on th hook keeper and still soft enough to have a lovely natural movement in the water.
