American adventure (7)- Introducing the umbrella rig

Here's the thing: this blog was a fishing blog way before it became a travelogue, and so here's something for my "bread and butter" angling readers. If you're a non-angler  just following the Stateside journey then please feel free to skip this and rejoin the adventure later, but this is to introduce UK based fisherpersons to a rig I've just discovered in the US.

 

Whenever I'm abroad I like to buy a fishing magazine from the country I'm in, and so a visit to Walmart (where there are aisles of fishing tackle amid the fruit and veg and clothing, and locked cabinets from which guns can be purchased) saw me obtain a copy of a bass fishing journal which was full of the, hitherto unknown to me, "umbrella rig".

 

The most cursory of glances tells you pretty much all you need to know.. A jig head which is attached to a  soft plastic bait and has "spokes" (to pursue the umbrella metaphor) with snap-lock swivels at the end upon which can be fastened smaller soft plastic shads, worms or grubs. On casting these hang limp, but on retrieval they fan out to create the illusion of a shoal of small baitfish darting through the water. In the UK I'm assuming that such a rig would be deemed illegal in freshwater on the basis of it being a multiple hook rig, but I can imagine a version that had a single soft plastic bait in the centre on a weighted jig head that was surrounded by willow leaf or colarado leaf spoons without hooks being a devestating tool. That's the great thing about dipping your toe into someone else's fishing culture ..... it makes you think.