Iaconelli Modifying Two Part Skirt Jigs to Make Finesse Jig on Mississippi River

The next stop was the Mississippi River out of Fort Madison. I'm going to tell you, talk about a tough tournament, you know this was a really tough one. You had high, muddy water, you had fish that were spread out, and you were coming off of a major flood so this was a real tough event.

I decided to fish backwaters in this event. You have main river and backwater and I decided to fish backwater, I locked one time up and I found the backwater that held a concentration of fish. I knew it was going to be tough. I'll be honest with you, the first day I didn't adjust, I didn't figure it out, but I stuck with it and the second and third day I caught limits both days. And I did that by slowing down and finesse fishing a jig.

You know when you talk about jig fishing, normally you think about a big jig, ripping it up off the bottom. But you could get a jig and you could finesse fish it and fish it slow and deliberately and that's what I did. And, of course, I used the Berkeley Ike's finesse fishing jig but I made a modification to the jig that really helped me catch these finicky fish. So I took the normal jig and I used the small one, I used a quarter ounce jig black and blue and we've got a two-part skirt on this jig and what I did in this tournament was I took the regular silicone skirt completely off. Get rid of that silicone skirt! And you're left with a hand tied living rubber section and it's not a lot it's just a small little puff of living rubber.

Then to that I added a Berkeley Chigger Craw. This is probably one of the best jig trailers out there. I just threaded that thing one there and if you look at it, it takes a normal jig and it makes it into a smaller, more compact package.

I took that little tiny jig, I fished it slow around any kind of wood or grass cover that I could find. I was able to get 5 bites a day, 5 keeper bites a day the last two days and move up in points. When things are tough, get a little jig, take that skirt off make it finesse and you'll catch more fish!