Jon gives some tips on choosing the right decoy rigs for big water hunting or hunting marshes.
Transcription:
We're out here hunting some big water today. You can hear the waves crashing behind me.
I wanted to talk to you about a couple of different ways of rigging your decoys. Here for this style of hunting, we have what you would call a Texas rig. The weight slides up and down, whereas the line slides through the swivel. That way you throw it out and the wade drops as however low it needs to be. These are really good for marsh setups, and they're really nice to carry in because you can just throw a bunch of decoys on a carabiner.
The problem that comes into play with these is when you get this chop or when you have too deep water. These waves and rough water is going to pick this decoy up with the wave and then drop it back down. If you don't have heavy weight or a long enough line like this, as that wave goes up the decoy is going to come in. It's going to end up like that one that's laying right on the shore.
If you are hunting marshes or shallow water that's not moving very fast, it's a great setup—Texas rig.
What we like to use is just a heavier decoy line. This is Rig'Em Right, Magnum Decoy Cord. It's thicker than your regular decoy line. It doesn't tangle up as much.
As you can see, we got a whole lot of it here. On the end of that guy we got a pretty heavy weight. What that's going to do is give us that option depending on what the depth of the water is and also account for these waves that rough chop.
You got enough line, decoy goes up, heavy enough weight, comes back down, stays there. It doesn't go any further because it's not picking that weight up as the waves are crashing.
If you're mainly a big water hunter or you're getting into big water hunting, go along with your line and put a heavy weight on the end.
If you're hunting marshes, shallower water, not fast-moving stuff, you can get away with a lighter weight and more of a Texas rig style.
If you're a budget hunter that does a little bit of both, you're trying to figure out what you like, an easy way to do that is have multiple types of rigs for your decoys. That way, you don't have to have your big water set up, your marsh set up. Just throw big swivels on them. We use stainless steel swivels that way you can pull you have your Texas rigs and you got your big water rigs and you can unhook them and have the best of both worlds if you're trying to save a little bit of money.
Hopefully, this tip helps you out with rigging your decoys for big water and for shallow marshes.
