Yes, yes, yes! At last there is a jig head for the 120mm long Fiiish Black Minnow that sits between their 12g Shore Head and the 25g Offshore Head, and whilst it might seem a bit strange to be so damn excited by a mere jig head, I make no apologies at all. Yes, I am excited, and yes, I can’t wait to see how this new 18g “Search” jig head from Fiiish might offer me something a little different with the killer Black Minnow, and especially with the 120mm size that I so love for shore fishing………..
And so you know, yes, I do some paid work with Fiiish France, but they would never ask me to write a blog post about their products etc. (and I wouldn’t do it anyway) Believe me, if you knew the Fiiish lot over in Brittany then you would understand how vulgar and un-Fiiish like they would think it to ask me to do anything like that. Hell, I can’t even be a part of these “Team Fiiish” things that they put together in their different regions because I do paid work with them. I must therefore leave it up to you to decide if you want to trust that I am writing a blog post like this because I am quite simply very excited by this new 18g Search jig head. So there!
18g Search head (left), 12g Shore head (right)
Anyway, that boring stuff aside, if I think back to the bigger bass I have either seen landed or caught myself over the last few years, then I am pretty sure that the one single lure which has been responsible for the highest percentage of those fish is the Black Minnow. Sure, it goes without saying that there are any number of different paddletails out there that will catch you a heap of fish, but I still say thanks to Matt the designer of the Black Minnow for designing a paddletail system that in one fail swoop managed to sort out all my paddletail needs, save for swimming one very shallow and slow. And even then I have tended to move away from slowly swimming something like the Yamamoto Swim Senko in shallow water when regular senkos and indeed the OSP DoLive Stick have proved so frigging lethal.
18g Search head (left), Shore 12g head (right)
And from my early days of fishing with the 120mm/12g Black Minnow, I’ve been hankering for a heavier jig head that isn’t as heavy as the 25g Offshore jig head. For a fair while now I have been taking the 20g Shore Head that’s designed for the larger 140mm body and been using it with the 120mm body, and for those times when I need more than 12g it’s a combination that has worked really well. But now we have an 18g jig head that fits nice and flush with the 120mm Black Minnow body, and I am interested to see how the shape of the head is somewhat different to both the smaller 12g and larger 25g heads. What other options might this give me?
Well my admittedly very basic understanding so far of this new 18g Search head is that it’s been designed around fishing the Black Minnow along the bottom, so I can’t help but get all excited over again about how the Fiiish Portugal lad I know told me a couple of years ago how he’s fishing the lure along their extremely rugged and swell-beaten coastline - check here. I am sure that a bunch of you here like to fish the Black Minnow by bumping it along in a decent run of current - as do I - and I wonder if this new slightly heavier head might prove very good for that style of lure fishing. How about simply nudging it along over a sandy bottom?
A 10lb+ bass taken by bumping a 120mm Black Minnow along the bottom in a run of current
How about whacking the Black Minnow out into a nice bit of rough, tumbling water and simply swimming it back like you might a minnow style hard lure? Might this new 18g Search head and it’s somewhat fatter/flatter bottom side work well for that? And I bet that on the drop it the profile of the head has to help as well. Yep, I don’t actually know yet, but damn I love trying different stuff out to better understand how it might work for me, plus whether it might indeed give me a few more options without needing to change to yet another type of paddletail because I have such strong levels of confidence when I am fishing with the Black Minnow.
90mm Black Minnow with the new 8g Search head
Oh, and there’s also a new 8g Search jig head that fits the smaller 90mm Black Minnow body, a size that I don’t use enough but I need to rectify that this year because I have seen plenty of bass caught on them. You know that I don’t sell fishing tackle, but to save me from having to reply to a bunch of emails and FB messages, these new heads are available now in the UK, so keep an eye on your local tackle shop or on this website here. Come on springtime, we need you here now please………..