Winter 2018
Heads
®
with Greg Gutierrez
My primary objective was to find suspended fish. I would cast it up on the shore and shake it, kind of pulse it through the water column as it sunk down and followed the contour of the bottom.”
Gutierrez quickly discovered that the water was different and not composed to effectively fish darter heads as it was back home. Many of the lakes were never clear cut and had lots of wood left in them.
Out West, the lakes and reservoirs are primarily devoid of cover and composed mainly of barren banks. For example, Shasta,
Oroville and a lot of the Motherlode Lakes were impounded in this manner.
Even out West, there are instances when the darter head loses its effectiveness.
“Once the water starts drawing down to the point where we get into some of the old brush and tree lines that are left in the lake, the darter head has a tendency to get hung up a lot,” explained Gutierrez. “If your bait doesn’t get bit by the time it hits the bottom, you are usually hung up and you have to go shake it (the bait) off or straighten out the hook. As great a technique as the darter head is, it can be limited to where you can throw it.”
Eastern Influences
When Gutierrez journeyed East, he found that everyone was using a ball head jig or as it later became known, the shaky head. Shaky heads are built with a bigger hook usually a #3/0 or #4/0; so that you can rig it weedless. For the most part, darter heads are poured with a smaller #1 or #1/0 hook. Initially Gutierrez liked the ball head, but quickly discovered that it was unfishable in some of the areas he was targeting.
“I fished it quite a bit, but I had issues with it particularly around timber and grass,” he said. “It did not come through the wood or the limbs like I wanted it to. It would roll over because it did not have a keel and it didn’t truly stand up.”
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