Which weight tungsten jig for crappies on ice…?

I’m so bad with hook sized and weights! I’m bored and I can’t ice fish so I’m going to order up some lures. Then I can do some more reorganize my ice fishing gear for the 5th time this year!

Tungsten Jigs
1/64
1/32
or 1/16

What I think you’ll find is most tungsten jigs using MM sizing. I have seen 3MM, 4MM, and 5MM. My best advice is to go to Kendersoutdoors.com and click on the orange/yellow tungsten jig. They have their jigs compared to a penny there. I think their 5MM with a gulp alive minnow or 4 spikes should be perfect for crappie. I love their prices too!

I use 5MM size 90% of the time. Both sunfish and crappies. The hook size is a tad small for crappies but gets the job done. If I need a larger hook I go to a non Tungsten Jig

The VMC Tungsten Fly is the specific jig I’m currently looking at. They are only listed in the 3 weights on all the sites I check.

Maybe I just get a smattering of all 3?

I dont have any of the Tungsten Fly, but do have some of the Tubby jigs. I would say you will probably want the 1/32 and 1/16 for crappie. The 1/64 are really small and I tend to use the 1/32 most in water up to 20 feet.
VMC jigs go by oz. not MM.

I believe the 1/64 is #14, 1/32 is #12, and 1/16 is either a 8 or 10

Here is a 1/64 and 1/32 compared to a penny, if that’s helps at all.

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You’ll want the 1/16oz version for crappies, esp. if you’re fishing in deeper than 20 FOW. Shallower or negative ‘pies, I’d consider the 1/32oz size. You’ll like that jig!

Joel

Another good thing about the heavier tungsten jigs is that I now find my old school lead-style depth finder obsolete. The 4mm-5mm tungsten jigs are more than heavy enough to detect bottom (i’ve tested this in at least 40′ of water last year) and you don’t have to retrieve your depth finder afterwords, just start fishing. Now if you have a flasher, this negates using your jig to find bottom but it’s just another advantage of fishing tungsten, less time fiddling with gear and more time fishing.

I do tie my own flies and have tied up a few of my own tungsten jigs for this ice season but I do have to say that those VMC flies look pretty darn “fly”! They seem like they will work great as a dropper fly, hard or soft water. If it were me I would pick up a some in each size in a few colors and fish the heck out of em’.

I like 1/16 size for them, I have been buying some tubby and tuned up custom jigs

I bought the 1/16. Any smaller then that seems kinda crazy

How can you feel 1/16 ounce of tungsten on the bottom in 40 ft of water but you can’t feel 1/16 ounce of lead?

Boss Hawg wrote:

How can you feel 1/16 ounce of tungsten on the bottom in 40 ft of water but you can’t feel 1/16 ounce of lead?

Probably using light braid. And that 1/16 tungsten is much smaller diameter so water resistance is much less. Both will play into the feel factor.

I go with 5mm tungsten in open water during summer. Ice fishing most of the time I use 4mm and 3mm and rarely the larger size. Ialso willuse plastic on those two sizes with success. I usually don’t fish in over over 18 feet all winter long and catch good gills and crappie. Occasionally with the 3mm hook size I will lose a large crappie unless the swallow it deep. Hope this helps!

I use the heaviest tungsten VMC offers, the 1/16th oz., the vast majority of the time when fishing crappie. Once in awhile the fish will respond better to a 1/32 but that just doesn’t seem to happen for me all that often with crappie. So I’d order heavier on the 1/16th than the 1/32nds and if my primary target was crappie I’d skip the 1/64th oz.