The seeds of a good fishing technique can take root in more than one place. They sprout quietly in the dark and when the time is right, suddenly blossom and then bear fruit for anglers everywhere. That’s the case with swimming a jig, currently one of the hottest techniques on the pro tours.

Roots in Upper Midwest

In Wisconsin and Minnesota, mention swimming a jig and the name Tom Monsoor usually enters the conversation. “I’ve fished tournaments for 20 years, and that’s how long I’ve been swimming a jig,” states Monsoor, of La Crosse, Wisconsin. “I’ve fished clear water all my life and started swimming a jig as an effective way to fish lily pads and other shallow vegetation. For 10 years I used a 1/8-ounce brown jig that I had custom-made in Iowa. It got me to an All American Championship in New York and a Tournament of Champions at Lake Okeechobee in Florida. I caught fish with that jig in both places, but few paid much attention.”

Monsoor says it wasn’t until he started fishing the FLW Tour in 2002 that TV coverage brought his jig-swimming technique to light. “Soon everyone started saying they’d been swimming a jig for a long time. But if they’d been experts at swimming a jig, why hadn’t they won over half a million dollars in tournaments and ended up on TV with the technique?”

Participating in FLW Tour events on southern reservoirs that lacked shallow vegetation, Monsoor was forced to adapt his jig-swimming technique. He built heavier jigs and tied new color patterns to match shad and bream.

Home Grown in Arkansas

Mitch Looper is not a tournament angler. “I never had an interest in it,” he says, “but I’ve always had an interest in catching big bass. The first time I saw someone swim a jig—sort of—and catch bass was in March 1984. My buddy Andy Scott was casting a jig to openings in dead weeds along the shore. To get it back, he’d rip it out of the vegetation and reel it across the surface. He caught a few bass and all his strikes came while reeling in. I took note, but didn’t try to develop this technique.”

The next spring, Looper and his wife were fishing a small Arkansas lake. He saw a big bass explode in a patch of water willows and made a beeline for it. After casting a buzzbait and spinnerbait to no avail, he tried a jig, planning to work it up and down in the matted weeds. “When the yo-yo action didn’t draw a strike, I started reeling it in. That’s when a huge wake came up behind the jig and a 71⁄2-pounder crushed it. I spent the rest of the day waking a jig through surface weeds. I had over 30 blowups that day but didn’t hook many.”

The next week he returned and applied the jig-waking technique once again. He landed several more big bass, but he realized the jig needed to be modified for this presentation. He flattened an Arkie head with a hammer and used sidecutters to shape the flattened head into a V. A friend made a mold for the jig that got him through almost two decades of waking a jig, before he convinced PRADCO Fishing to upgrade the jig and market it in their BOOYAH line.

Growing Season in the Northeast

In June of 1992, the evening before a team tournament on Pennsylvania’s Lake Arthur, a young competitor named Dave Lefebre was quietly asking friends at the campground if they had any spare white spinnerbait skirts, white grubs, or unpainted weedless jigheads. The next day, using salvaged components, Lefebre and his partner won the event by a substantial margin. Over dinner that evening he told me what he’d stumbled upon.