Most slow-pitch jiggers fishing 100-plus feet of Gulf water want their lure on the deck. Bama Saltwater's Stephen does the opposite — he stops it short, never lets it touch bottom, and lets the closed-season red snapper come up the column to find it.
In a video posted to the Bama Saltwater channel about a month ago, Stephen used the closed Gulf snapper season as an excuse to test a new jerk-squid jig presentation off the Alabama coast and ended up with a clinic in mid-water-column slow-pitch jigging.
"My setup's pretty easy," Stephen said on the rail of his 23-foot centre console. "It's 50-pound fluorocarbon leader. I do a PR knot to 30-pound braid. Accurate Valiant 500 narrow. This is my dedicated slow-pitch setup. There's not much this thing can't catch."
The bait was a 7-inch jerk squid threaded onto a horizontal jig head with two assist hooks attached via a heavy-duty split ring. The line was tied to the top eye of the jig head, which keeps the squid sitting horizontally — the natural orientation for a squid in the water column. "If I was casting, I tie it to the front," he noted. "The hook-up ratio is so much better."
The drop was the unusual part. The reef under the boat sat in 105 feet of water, but Stephen never let the lure get there. He stopped the drop short and worked the squid through the middle of the column with slow, deliberate lifts and pauses. "Drop it down a few seconds. Let it sit there. Lift it. Let it fall. And they hit it on that drop," he said as the rod loaded.
Every fish came up red. The reef was clearly stacked with snapper, even with the season closed. "I think we're sitting on top of a lot of red snapper, though, which is no surprise," Stephen said. "They're very abundant. The strict regulations — there's a reason they are abundant because of those strict regulations." He carefully released each fish, noting that because the snapper weren't coming straight off the bottom they showed no signs of barotrauma and could swim back down on their own.
The squid bait itself proved durable through the bite — TPE material, stretchy, body intact through fish after fish. The plastic eyes tend to come off as the bait gets chewed, but the profile holds.
Most fish committed on the fall — the hallmark response for the slow-pitch jerk-squid presentation. "That one hit it on the fall, which is what majority of them are going to do with a lure like this," Stephen explained.
After several drops on the same reef without finding anything other than reds, Stephen pulled up and ran for a weed line that was just starting to form closer to shore. A small jerk squid on a half-ounce jig head got hit on a topwater cast — a feisty bonita that he kept for bait. The bonita then burped up a small cluster of natural squid the same size as his lure. "Can't say I'm throwing the wrong bait," he said.
A drifting sea turtle ghosted the boat at one point with no cobia in tow. A brief grass-line search turned up little more than the usual Easter-weekend wind, and the trip wrapped after an unsuccessful run for mahi mahi and a brief crab-pot pull on the way home.