Building the ULTIMATE Catfish JUG (DIY Project)

alright guys so welcome back you guys did great job they're hitting that like button on the last video so today we're going to be making what I consider the ultimate adjustable catfish and jug so I just want to thank everybody who hit that like button if you would take a moment hit that like button right now for this video if you guys like these type of videos if you like catfish and things like that it's free doesn't take a but a second and you know it really helps me out so I really appreciate the support in the comments and everything so we're gonna jump right into this here and we're going to to make this video here for you guys so what we're going to do is we're going to make a adjustable catfish jug basically and the adjustability comes in the fact that you can adjust the the weight as well as the depth setting which is very convenient because you know a lot of times with jug fishing the depth that you run is quite critical and the fact that you know how many fish you catch at the end of the day so I've got a couple examples here for you so these are a couple of jugs that I've just picked up that were abandoned on the lake this is your very typical jug here it's a noodle with a piece of pipe in it it's got some twisted line on it with a way no hook and it's roughly two foot long or so this thing's fine if you're fishing in water that's you know a foot deeper than this line other than that you know for the most part your catfish are gonna be just barely off the bottom that's how I like to run my jug so ride around a foot ten inches off the bottom that way you're not dragging through the bottom collecting debris catfish will definitely come up to feed but you definitely up your rate if you are fishing right in that zone there's this is the problem with this so that's a homemade job not crazy about it this is more of a commercially available one that I found this is a just a jug here and we'll handle on it and a place to tie some some line once again whoever did this they they're running about a foot deep or so so you're missing a lot of the water column no adjustability in it so anyway let's show you how I use my how I make mine here they're super easy all the materials here are very inexpensive you can make these things for under a dollar piece total so if you can run 25 jugs in your state you can go out for $25 and have 25 books in the water very very effective economical way these things aren't crazy expensive to make the way I'm going to show you you can spend tons of money if you want to or you can spend very minimal money but in the end it's all about catching fish right so anyway so what we're going to use is a standard pool noodle standard pool noodle has a hole in it that's roughly fifteen sixteenths to one inch so we're gonna use pipe to make our dropper with and we're gonna use 3/4 inch schedule 40 that's 3/4 inch IB so 3/4 inch has roughly you know has a one-inch OD which fits very nice into this this pool noodle so where you can glue it and it's a you know very secure so just watch that if you're going out and buying these things you know this is a couple bucks for a piece of this you don't need schedule 80 and this pool noodle tell if you buy them in the winter time you can get them for a dollar piece so so nothing you know alright so here's where we break it down as far as cost pool noodles are fifty inches long the average ones and we've got a 10-foot stick of pipe so if we cut these twelve and a half inches long we get four jugs out of one full noodle and if we cut this pipe here a foot long we get ten jugs out of one piece of pipe so if you buy five noodles and two pieces of pipe you can get 20 jugs you know so it's super affordable the next thing we're going to use is we're gonna have some screw eyes these thing comes in packet these things come in packs of 10 so once again no waste this whole project is you know where you can make a number of jugs with minimal waste these are nothing more than a Groo i with kind of a lag type bolt on the end of it we're gonna run that into our PVC pipe these things are crazy cheap - swivels you don't need a fancy swivel these are you can get these for like a dollar and a half I use size three because it's got a bigger opening in it you just want an eye opening big enough to run your line through it and then we're gonna use whatever hook now I don't want to say a whole lot about hooks because I know that's opening a can of worms literally but I will tell you what I use I run a four to five OTT circle hook on my jug lines now for the most part your jug fish in you're fishing for eaters you know that five to seven pound range as well as you know if you want to go after your Fiddler's and a a four to five out hook will do the job just fine I use circle hooks because a circle hook is more or less designed to kind of set itself as opposed to your Jay hook or a treble hook or kale hook I just prefer it right you can use a bigger hook no problem but I also want you know I want the fish to come up eat the bait and pull down as you know quickly as possible without taking a lot of time to do it and and get that hook in his mouth and so that's why I use just a little smaller hook if I'm drifting you know I run like a taut hooks and I still catch small fish on them but you know 4 to 5 is a great choice for a jug line and like I said I'm a firm believer in circle hooks so that brings us to basically you know everything but the line to finish this up with now this line here and I want to talk about this because I see a lot of people using twisted mason line and that's what's on the two jugs that I showed you before twisted mason line is is not the line that you want to use really for for jug lines because you have to singe it or it unravels real bad it's just it it balls up if you don't have a swivel on it so get go to the store and you know spend a couple extra dollars on a roll of braided mason line normally the braided mason line has a higher breaking strength anyway in the same small diameter as well as this stuff here will not unravel on you because it's braided there's no need to singe this stuff so it takes out a whole step your jugs it will last for a lot longer these jugs here I've been running you know some of these four five six years you know and I've still got no problems out of them so anyway I really would push you towards the braided mason line I'll leave links to all this stuff down below there'll be Amazon links but just so you guys can get an idea what I'm talking about next we'll talk about the glue that I'm gonna use so I use glue on to glue the noodles to the pipe there's gonna be guys out there that say you need to hard fast in it I can tell you I've ran these for a lot of years I have ever only lost one I've ever only had one malfunction I had one noodle they got stuck in a fork of a tree with a fish on and he pulled the pipe out but I can tell you I've caught hundreds and hundreds it's not thousands of fish by gluing up the pipe to the noodle if you use a like a medium body PVC cement or a rubber contact cement and you coat that whole pipe what I'm going to show you is you're gonna have like 35 square inches of coverage into that noodle you you can't pull that out once it sets so anyway like I said I'll show you guys how to hard fasten them too because I know there'll be people you know that want to see that but definitely if you don't want to there's no reason I don't really hard fasten them simply because I don't like that sharp edge but anyway it's you know one or the other all right so let's get to building this thing here real quick it's super simple I'll just demonstrate for you guys so as I said before these pool noodles we're breaking them down and evenly so a 50 inch pool noodle um I got a mark here twelve and a half inches so we'll just cut this you can cut it however you want my portable bandsaw does an excellent job makes real quick work of that and our pipe here we're gonna cut at one foot all right so that's real easy we're done with that so we've got our two sections here so next we're gonna mark out this pipe for all our holes that would need to be drilled so real simple here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come up two inches on this pipe and I'm gonna make a mark and then I'm gonna come up 3/4 inches and I'm gonna make another mark and I'm gonna spin it 180 and I'm gonna make a nother mark at about 1/2 inch 3/8 somewhere right in there we got three marks on our pipe here all right so let's assemble this thing here so I'm going to take just a very small bit here 16th inch or so we're gonna drill a pilot hole for our screw eye and we're gonna do that after our 3/4 inch mark just give ourselves a little pilot hole next I'm going to come and I'll throw like an 8-inch bit in here and I'm gonna put a hole here at my 1/2 inch mark and that's what our actual dropper line is gonna attach to all right so next let's take a screw eye these screw eyes have about a quarter-inch eye in them that's really all that's concerning me whenever I buy these so we'll just take that and we'll get that started in our 3/4 mark and once you get it started if you take a nail or at all or something and and run it in there it helps a little bit there we're gonna leave that in that manner perpendicular to the pipe now if you want to you can add a drop of superglue to that to keep it from spinning they usually don't spin once they set because there's not a lot of pressure on them all right so next let's take before we glue this up and we'll take some line now why the lengthen your dropper line is completely dependent on the lakes that you fish so we are lakes around here very shallow really you know so 10 to 12 foot is kind of an average for for our Lakes they just our lakes just aren't that deep so I normally run about a 10 foot dropper just so I can cover all the water so what I'm gonna do is I've got a 10 foot piece of my Mason line here I'm just gonna run that through and through our half inch hole here and tie it off now you guys can use whatever knot that you prefer I prefer the 3 loop knot it's kind of made for heavy mono and basically what it is run your line through leave you a little slack loop it around it three times make that loop and then come back in and run your tag in back around and then pull it back out through your centrally making like a three loop slip knot on this you can use whatever knot that you prefer but you know these work great for you know your heavier heavier lines it's the same line that I use whenever I run you know for like muskie leaders or you know big leaders for catfish alright so we've got that tied on here now let's come down to our into our dropper with our Barrow swivel on so we've got a number three barrel swivel it's got roughly a quarter inch I it's just easy to get the string through I highly recommend a swivel on a jug line it'll save your jug line and we'll do the same three loop knot here nothing very complicated about that once you get good at these you can leave really really short tag ends by doing this three loop knot there now we'll come to our dropper line so I like to run you know roughly of 910 inch drop or you don't a huge dropper because I put my weight right at that swivel and you don't want you know a lot of swinging action to it but you just want to hold that bait so I usually go you know little less than a forearm normally what I do is I just measured off the noodle so you know 12 inches by time you tie your knot you end up with like a 9 inch 9 inch dropper so we'll just do that here real quick we'll cut that you guys can see that braided Mason line is not fraying at all there's no need to singe it so we'll tie it to our other side of our swivel here and we'll give that nice three loop knot there tie that in place like I said guys whenever you kind of get good at tying this knot you can tie it with like super super minimal tag ends which I mean if you're into that whatever but you can see very minimal tag in okay so come down to the hook here like I said whatever I'm not gonna say a whole lot of hooks I'll tell you what I use but that's about it so I got a this is a five on circle hook now I am a firm believer in snelling hooks you guys don't know what that is basically it's it's bringing the line wrapped around the hook so we're with a circle hook application it forces that hook to roll to the to the to the outside instead of the inside and I even go so far as I smell my jug line hook so it's just very easy to smell here we'll just run this line and whenever you snow you always want to run start at the inside where the hook Bend is and work out and with this big this big line I only wrap it like two or three times but what we're gonna do is we're just gonna make a loop come back up that loop pinch with our fingers we're gonna give it a couple three wraps three or four wraps with this big line you know you can't get crazy with it but it definitely will hold and then we'll just run that tag in through that loop that you created and then we'll give it a nice little pull up the hook shank there and you can see what happened you kind of make a slipknot around the shank of the hook so the tighter that the line pulls the tighter that knot will grab and you can see once you get good at it you leave very minimal tag end as well that's why I said there's about a nine or a 10 inch inch dropper there and you can see by Snelling that as that hook turns it has to turn to the you know the mouth of the fish basically and that's by putting that line through the inside of the hook you know you can believe it or not but I am a firm believer that all right so we've got our pipe here we've got our holes drilled we've got our eye in they've got everything made up now it comes time to glue this thing to the noodle so as I said you use contact cement rubber cement like a medium or heavy body PVC cement they all work real good you just don't want to use anything like superglue because it'll melt the noodle so our two inch line that we marked here that's our stopping point for our glue and that's what we're gonna wrap our line on so it just kind of gives you a reference point so all I do is I just take some of this glue here and I am quite generous with it and I coat the entire pipe here and once that glue sets guys I'm telling you you can pull in some big fish with it it really bonds nicely to the to the noodle so anyway we've got a nice stopping point here with our line so we don't put the glue too far down there it's coated and we'll just spin that up in to the noodle just to get that glue nice and covered around there and you'll end up with just a nice nice little bead there of glue and you can either just kind of wipe that away or let it set up no big deal we'll just wipe that away for video purposes here so we can finish this all right now if you don't believe me that this glue will hold and you want to hard fasten it here's one one quick way to do it I wouldn't suggest using wire because it number one it's sharp on the hand whenever you grab it and number two if you're not using stainless water it will rust so I give you the alternative use a zip tie so if you don't if you want to do this just quarter-inch drill bit or so and a drill reach down drill straight through that pipe will run a zip tie right through that pipe and we will connect it here we'll connect it to that noodle that gives you a hard firm fastening point you know in case your glue would fail um but like I said hundreds of hunters fish I've only had one casualty trim that line off so another option for building this if you're a guy that likes to run jugs at night is now you can take some reflective tape so this is some reflective tape that I got and we can dress our noodle up with reflective tape and there you have a super reflective jug line like I said you can use this or not but you know it it is definitely an option and then it also gives you an option to write your name you know because here we have to have name and address on so anyway there's that that's your completed ultimate jug guys so let me show you how it works all right so with the depth setting you know as I said before with jug fishing you really want to keep that bait you know 10 inches to a foot off the bottom keep it moving keep it you know from dragging up leaves and you definitely don't want it to too awful high so what we can do now is because we've got that piece of pipe sticking out we can just wind our line up on there and let's say let's say today we're gonna be fishing in in 4 foot of water and we want to fish this thing three foot deep so we leave out three foot of line we just simply make a loop in that line we pull it right through that I suck it down on that eye and now that line is completely secure it can't go anywhere and you've got to set depth of three foot or so and then if we say the next day we want to fish deeper water just pull that line right off that I if you run run that eye all the way down in it can't possibly catch so it's super easy to to adjust on the fly say we want to drop it a foot or so just reset boom there it is deeper same thing with the weights so basically I run I run kind of to two main weights I run like a 3/8 or 1/2 ounce weight and then I run like a 2 ounce weight so this noodle here at 12 inch noodle I actually just did this because I knew there would be questions on it a 12 inch noodle takes not quite 3 pounds to sink this thing so you know 40 45 ounces to be exact to make it neutrally buoyant I did it for you guys but anyway so a two ounce weight will keep this thing from drifting a lot more than say like a half ounce or a three ounce or 3/8 ounce weight and if you're fishing in the summertime sailing like a fly out in the main lake where you don't want these things to move around a lot use a heavier weight and keep them from drifting so far so these weights here are if you if you go to the storm bottom they're gonna be called casting weights but it's essentially a bell sinker with a AI in it and you can either buy these with like the preformed dies in the lead or this is what I use for spider rig and I pour these things by the Dozen and and they have the the metal I brass insert in it so all we need to do to make this weight adjustable is come down and normally I run my weight just right above my swivel same concept as the setting the deck just pinch that line together run it through that eye and then just roll it right around your weight and you have a weight that's set on your line there's no need to run it right down to your hook you can if you want I suggest how I do it there's a 2 ounce weight on there say I want to change the weight out super easy just pull that line right out of that eye so let's just say we wanted to change a different weight we'll just take that out and go smaller or heavier weight and there you go simple easy at the end of the day the whole package because you've got an anchoring point up here you just wrap that up all the way around the whole thing stick your hook in your noodle and you're good to go and you want to keep setting depth different you know it stays in one place until you reset that so that's about it guys that is that is what I consider the ultimate and adjustability of jug lines they work great super super effective like I said take some of it take some of the tips tricks whatever from this vid but you know these things really do work they work great one final thing storing these things so a lot of issues are storing them over the years this is the best method I found this is a a flexible clothes basket you can get these four five six bucks what this hid you can put 25 of these jugs in this clothes basket if you pull in a little twisty ties on it they can't come out if not you can have your handles here they've got air holes all the way around them so your jugs don't get mold or anything on them and you can just transport them from boat or to the garage or anything so they work out really really great as far as transporting stuff so anyway guys here's the jug what I consider the ultimate and adjustability these things will catch big fish small fish every fish in between and it's just super super convenient to you know to have that adjustability you know you could put 30 40 50 feet of line on this thing if you really wanted to you've got the room because you know there's a good inch and a quarter of distance here between this eye and the noodle that you can just wrap up like a spool so anyway guys that's going to kind of wrap up this video I hope you guys enjoyed if you would hit that like button it really does help if you're new to this channel and you like what you see consider subscribing to it as always leave a comment I love reading your guys's comments and and also for those of you has been around for a while and you've seen some of the stuff that I do and you would like to see a similar DIYs to this leave a comment down below let me know what you guys would like to see and and we'll definitely try to get that get that up for you guys alright guys I appreciate all support until next time

Channel: Coon Creek Outdoors

Views: 209,156

Keywords: Fishing, catfishing, diy, jug line, trotline, Outdoors

Id: NQniBbcpEwM

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020