You got it b.viper--just because a lure looks like one thing in our pleasant, well-lit, 3-dimensional world, doesn't mean that it doesn't look like something all together different in the dimly lit, primarily one and two dimensional world of our quarry. A jig and and trailer in fact is a perfect example: The shape and action of the trailer can mean everything in a jig presentation. Trim the legs up a little tighter and put a claw-tail or plastic craw on it and you have a crawfish...but put a twin tail on there with swimming legs, or something like the old pork frog, and swim it in brush and below mats, and your fishing a bluegill presentation. Did you ever wonder why a jig catches larger average bass than many lures? It has everything to do with the size of bass that can deal with a spiny-rayed dorsal fin like a bluegill or sunfish has. Probably one of the first lessons a bass ever learns is that a spiny ray supper has a chance of choking him to death. And I've seen too many times when the bass were on a hot crawfish bite that a basic jig and pig would catch nothing while a plastic craw would catch fish after fish.
Just because a guy wins a tourney on a jig and then assumes that it was because the fish were feeding on craws, doesn't mean that his convoluted logic was correct. The jig is a universal lure for all fishes all over the world, and only in bass fishing does nearly everyone assume that it represents something other than a baitfish. The funny thing is, is that the jigs in bass fishing first came about as the fly and rind on the highland reservoirs in Tennessee and Kentucky, and this hair jig or "fly" equipped with a pork "eel" caught monster bass off of drops in the wintertime, particularly on Kentucky's Lake Cumberland where some locals used big jigs, and 6 to 9 inch pork eels for your basic large gizzard shad presentation.
And yes properly equipped, a rubber legged jig does make a nice crawfish presentation too.
Because inquiring minds want to know,
Dean
