The Power to Assist - Assist Rig for Vertical Jigs

It’s an intense feeling. Finally after a year of preparation you’ve dropped a jig through a hundred metres of water and a school of samsons. You flip over the bail arm, jig your lure through the bottom layer of fish and come tight.

This is where the big girls are, hard against the bottom with a load of smaller males milling above. This is why you’ve come, just for this moment. Size is a relative thing, as much with samson fish as anything else. Here the small males range from 15 kilo to 35 kilo, not a fish to be taken lightly on any tackle and the females are bigger again.

Samsons place enormous strain on all your tackle.
An assist rig is your best bet for connecting a hook to
your jig and having it last the fight

You’ve spent the money on the right gear. Your Daiwa Saltiga or Shimano Stella is yielding 35 kilo braid under 15 kilos of drag. Right now, as you put a gloved hand on the spool to stop the fish from reaching the wreck that is only a few more metres away you hope…….no you pray that everything is going to hold. This is balls to the wall jigging and you love it. Right now, with everything pushed to the limit, if something can break it will.

Happy Angler - Happy Samson.
The use of single hooks via an assist rig means less damage
to the fish and much better survival rates for released fish.

I’ve only done a handful of days jigging for the samsons off Fremantle in WA but so far I’ve seen reels, rods, line, leaders, hooks and swivels give way under the extreme pressures exerted by these great tackle testers. I’ve been lucky to spend most of these days with Al Bevan, a passionate angler who likes to push his tackle past the limit just to see what that limit is.

Another fine samson. Deepwater jigging for these fish with
Shikari charters has been our classroom for the past 6 years. 

The jigging tackle of today hardly resembles that of the ’70s. Just looking at the way hooks are attached to jigs is worlds apart from that era. No longer a treble slung from rear of the jig by a split ring; today it’s light yet strong, chemically sharpened single hooks attached to the top of the jig via a length of dyneema PE chord, a solid ring and a split ring. This is referred to as an assist rig and it makes a huge difference to the amount of pressure you can exert on a fish.

The Assist Rig - Slung here from the top of one of our favourite jigs,
the Fisherman Crazy Long 420gram

A single hook has twice the gape when compared to a treble with the same profile. This gives a better hold on the fish which in turn means you can pull harder before the hook will pull or straighten. It is also a much safer bet for both the fish and the angler where catch and release are practised.

Most fish will take a jig and the extra gape of a single hook
off an assist rig means that even soft mouthed species like
Southern Bluefin Tuna are less likely to tear free during the fight

With the hook suspended from the top of the jig it is less likely to snag on bottom structure. The swinging connection via the dyneema PE braid allows the hook more freedom to locate on the strike. It also eliminates a lot of problems with hooks pulling when the weight of the jig acts directly upon it.

Once upon a time a fish like this Amberjack was a huge
 jiggin achievement. Today with advancements in tackle
and technique it's just another good fish. 

While plenty of jigs come rigged ready to go there appears to be a tendency to use cheap terminals to keep the price down. As a retailer I understand this but when I only get the chance to jig for samsons once or twice a year the difference in price between the best and the worst in terminals isn’t a consideration when compared to the overall cost of flying from Melbourne to WA for a week. Those cheap terminals might cost me the fish of the trip, possibly of a lifetime and I’m just not prepared to take that risk.

With species like snapper that are sometimes timid on the hit having a double assist rig may help pin a fish that would be missed on the std single assist as shown below.

Don’t go over the top and make one for every jig either. It is much easier to store your jigs without the assist rig attached. It’s simply a matter of attaching the jig you want to use to the assist rig via a heavy duty split ring. This is far quicker than cutting one jig off and tying a new one on each time you are ready for a change.

On a recent trip with Al I made a heap of assist rigs up before I went and then proceeded to jig for 4 days without replacing the original rig once. Sure I changed jigs and even re-tied a chaffed leader but that single decoy cutlass hook stayed with me for every fish.

How to make your assist rig. In the following demo we've used, 250lb Dyneema PE cord, 11/0 Fisherman Siden hook and a 7.5 Owner solid ring.

Start by taking a length of cord, double it over and tie a simple over hand knot in the ends. Make sure you pull this knot up as tight as possible. Now tie another over hand knot in the cord near the first knot but don't pull it tight. Feed the eye of your hook through the open part of the knot following the knotted end into the knot. Now tighten this onto the hook shank making sure that the first knot pulls up to the second knot. This acts as a stopper. Now take the open loop and twist it around the hook shank a couple of times before feeding it through the hook eye making certain to exist the hook eye on the same side as the hook point. Finally pass the loop through the solid ring and pass it back over securing it to the end of the loop. You assist rig is now finished and ready to attach to your jig via a heavy duty swivel.

Whether you’re new to jigging or have been doing it since the ’70s the assist rig is your friend, understand how it works and utilise its power to land fish bigger than you ever dreamed possible.

For more information contact the team at Compleat Angler Melbourne

P: (03) 9620 3320

E: melbourne@compleatangler.com.au

W: www.compleatanglermelbourne.com.au

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Couldn't help adding one for the road!