The wakasagi rig

What it's for

Wakasagi (Japanese pond smelt), a small silver fish caught in numbers through the cold months. Everything about this rig is small: tiny hooks, a fine line, a light weight, and a short, very sensitive rod with a tiny reel or a hand spool, because the fish themselves are only about 10 to 15 cm long with a small, soft mouth. You fish it straight down, from a dock or a pier, from a heated dome boat that sits like a little greenhouse over the lake, or through a hole in the ice. The string of hooks lets you catch several at once when a shoal moves under you. It is a quiet, precise, sit-down kind of fishing, a different trip from the bass on the same lakes, and the catch makes a fine tempura.

The rig at a glance

Read top to bottom, the way it hangs straight down. The main line is very fine braid (around PE 0.2 to 0.3, about 0.08 to 0.10 mm). It runs down to the wakasagi shikake, a ready-made string of five to seven tiny hooks, each on its own very short dropper coming off the spine of the rig. The hooks are small sode-pattern hooks, around #1 to #2, often finished glow or pearl to show up in deep or coloured water. Below the bottom hook is a small weight, 3 to 5 g, on the very end. The whole rig is short, light and fine because wakasagi are tiny and shy. The defining detail is the ladder of small hooks on their droppers above a small bottom weight, baited and fished vertically so a shoal can take several hooks at once.

How to build it

1. Tie on the shikake. A wakasagi shikake comes ready-made, wound on a small card with a loop or a swivel at each end. Tie the top of the shikake to your fine braid main line with a small Palomar knot, or join loop to loop if the card has a loop. Unwind it carefully so the fine droppers do not tangle.
2. Add the weight. Attach the small 3 to 5 g weight to the bottom eye or loop of the shikake with a Palomar knot. The weight carries the fine rig straight down and holds it steady under the dock or boat. If you tie your own dropper string instead of buying one, the droppers are tied as dropper loops, the same standing-loop knot the gambe and sabiki rigs use.
3. Bait every hook. Pinch a small piece of red maggot onto each tiny hook so the point is just covered, keeping the bait small because the fish have small mouths. A sliver of chicken breast (sasami) keeps better on the hook if you are fishing all day. Now lower it straight down.

How to fish it

Lower the baited rig straight down until the weight just touches the bottom, then lift it a little so the lowest hooks sit just off the bed, because wakasagi usually feed close to the bottom. Hold the short, sensitive rod or watch the fine tip and give the rig tiny lifts and pauses, a gentle jiggle of a centimetre or two, to make the small baits flutter. The takes are very soft, a light tap or a small extra weight on the line, so watch closely and lift gently rather than striking hard. When you feel a fish, do not rush to reel in: leave it down a moment and you will often catch a second or third hook as the shoal feeds, then lift the little string up steadily. Find the depth the shoal is holding at and stay on it; a sounder or simply counting where the bites come helps. From a dock or pier you fish over the edge; from a dome boat you fish down through the floor in the warm; through the ice you fish down the hole. It is patient, repetitive, productive fishing once you are on a shoal.

Where this rig works

Wakasagi fishing is a Japanese winter speciality, run from docks, heated dome boats and the ice on cold lakes. Across the atlas it is fished on Lake Kawaguchi under Mount Fuji, the best-known dock and dome-boat smelt fishing within reach of Tokyo; on Lake Ashi in Hakone, where the season opens ceremonially on 1 October; and on Lake Shikotsu in Hokkaido and other cold lakes where the smelt run. As the atlas grows, every new water with a wakasagi season will link to this same page. The basic ice setup, and the safety that goes with fishing on a frozen lake, is covered on the ice fishing page.

Wakasagi rig questions