Hair Or Marabou Jigs

[Jeremi414]

I'm off on Monday so I'm going to sit down and do up some smallie jigs. Any thoughts on if I should tie one or the other? Or have deer hair and marabou jigs in the same colors and weights. Any advice on colors would be great. Was thinking of adding pine squrrial strips on the bucktail jigs.

[Wayne SW/MO]

I'm partial to hair. I like dark tops with a sparse belly, orange, chartreuse, or natural white.

[Mitch f]

At the risk of JoeD responding by saying "Hair Smair, just throw the darn bait in the water and a fish will bite it!" I'm going to try to shorten the response.

I like hair better because there are more varieties, I do love marabou however, it just doesn't last as long and doesn't flair until its still. One thing I always do with marabou is strip it off the main "spine". Unless you're tying the south end of a north bound Wooly Bugger you don't want the end of the jig looking stiff like a paint brush from Sherman Williams.

As far as hair jigs, I will start by saying you need to determine if you are imitating minnows or crayfish. I'm assuming crayfish, so you need something that will last a few fish. For a long lasting jig, I would go with Bucktail, which is the most robust but doesn't have as much action....Squirrel, Raccoon, which is middle of the road, are a good balance of durability and action...and Arctic Fox and Rabbit which have great action. Rabbit also lasts a long time. If rabbit hair was 2" long, it would be my only choice, period. But since rabbit hair is only 1 or so inches long, you either have to palmer it on a shank, or use the strip for a tail (which I don't really like). Right now my choice for best all around is Raccoon, which you can get at some fly shops. See picture below. You can use either the longer guard hairs or the finer diameter under fur for different sized jigs/applications.

On more cool thing about hair is that you can wash it with mild soap and water after use to get all the scum off and it looks brand new for your next trip.

[Gavin]

I like hair jigs...and I tie a variety of them....Black Bear is good, that Finn Racoon is good, Arctic Fox is good but super pricey...Craft hair makes a good jig too.

[Jeremi414]

Think I will just do bucktails. Some olives, brown, black. A brown over white for a baitfish pattern. Should I put a little flash in the baitfish pattern? Silver or gold maybe?

[Wayne SW/MO]

I've always believed I did better with a little, very little, highlight hair on the belly. I think it's because crawdads often have a little chartreuse or red edge on their carapace. Minnows have various color stripes on their sides. I don't believe fish reason, but I do believe they get conditioned to color combinations meaning food.

[exiledguide]

The "rule " when I started tying a long time ago was hair in moving water and Maribou in still water Didn't seem to matter on the water. I know I tend to overthink patterns at times. My only rule was Black, Brown, Yellow or White. Then all the synthetic material showed up and I just started having jigs tied for me. More time for fishing.

[Al Agnew]

I tied up some hair jigs this past week. In the picture you'll see several without tails, which are designed to use with a double lobed plastic trailer that I cut out of Zoom Brush Hogs (and by the way, I found some Brush Hog knockoffs at Dunn's cheap and now have enough of them in three colors to last for years). Note that the other two have tails. I somewhat prefer the ones without tails, because I think the fish hold onto a jig with a plastic trailer longer than one with just hair.

These are all made solely with crosscut rabbit strips wound onto the jig. The tails are red squirrel strips (I don't like rabbit strips for the tails because they are a little too thick in appearance in the water on jigs this small).

I suppose they loosely imitate crawdads, but I don't think that's very important. In the olive and light brown or light olive color they could just as easily imitate sculpins or fingerling hogsuckers. Crawdads aren't very active in the winter, anyway. I think that in reality they just look like SOME kind of bottom organism that a bass would mistake for food...you don't have to match the hatch with bass.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't like bucktail except for possibly light colored jigs meant to be fished in a "float and fly" setup that imitate minnows. No way I'd use bucktail for a bottom bumping jig anymore when the rabbit and squirrel works so well and is so easy to tie. On the ones I tied this week I used two or three different colors of rabbit on each jig, but they'd probably work as well or almost as well just using one color. And I actually prefer craft hair for the float and fly jigs.

Marabou works just fine for either kind of jig, but is a bit more of a pain to tie for me.

[Old plug]

When I used to tie my own they were always hair I liked to put small traitor on the back of everything marabou sticks to it. Mostly in brown. That was my ticket from birds nest to Onandaga

[Jeremi414]

I should also say that most of my smallmouth fishing is in the red/ blue ribbon waters. So no plastic trailers. I am going to use some fox tail for some smaller jigs. That hair is around 1.5 inches. Very crawfish looking colors.