Colour, sink rate, or place — only one was the answer
Overnight rain had left the outer bay blown out. Working a wind-shadowed harbour carefully produced nothing. Of the three moves for a tough day, which one actually paid?
Why this video
Autumn eging. Heavy rain fell through the night and the outer bay is blown out — eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds of building a day that refuses to co-operate. The choice is a harbour in the lee of the wind. Waves are up outside, so the first filter is simply somewhere it is safe to fish; on top of that, “the rain will have dropped the water temperature a little, so I picked a harbour with good tidal flow” — using current to offset the cooling.
Dawn, and the light is low, so the colour chosen is one that shows a silhouette. High water is around nine, with slack not far off. “If nothing responds, we move” — the move is built into the plan before the first cast. He does not go straight to the tip of the breakwater either, but starts at the base and works towards the middle: “squid hold near the base too, so I work it carefully.” The JetChaser goes out, is fed down to the bottom and dragged; if there is no bite, he does not re-sink it but jerks again.
None of it produces a squid early on — enough that the opening has to be re-shot. The tide line is tried as well. The answer only comes after a long move to a different area. What makes this video worth keeping is not the good fish at the end, but that what was discarded and what was chosen on the way there survives in order.
Key Moments
Our Analysis
Three moves for a tough day are named, and they are put in order: “change the colour, change the sink rate — but the best one, I think, is to change place. Go where the squid are.” He does move a long way, and the good fish comes there. What the productive spots have in common is stated outright — “it is a cove, and bait piles up here.” The place Azuma had landed his earlier was “a small cove” as well: “bait seemed to be piling up, so sure enough the squid were on it.”
Colour and sink rate are adjustments that assume the squid are already in front of you. They work through the reasons a present animal will not eat, so if nothing is there, nothing you change produces an answer. Only changing place questions the assumption itself, and that is likely why it ranks above the other two. The next question is where to stand — and if you work backwards from bait to where autumn squid hold, you arrive at terrain where wind and current push bait together: coves and drop-offs. Reading the ground in the video (“the bottom drops away here”) and checking the water is clear before committing looks like exactly that reasoning, carried out in the order it is described.
“In autumn eging, bait is the key” is not a statement about which egi to tie on. It is a statement about where to stand. In practice it changes the criterion for giving up on a spot. “No bites, so I move” means you cannot leave until you have worked through colours and sink rates. “No sign of bait, so I move” can be decided before the first cast. The worse the conditions, the more directly that speed of judgement converts into water covered.
Field Data
- Country
- Japan
- Season
- Autumn
- Time of day
- Dawn
- Target
- Bigfin reef squid
- Weather
- Light rain (heavy overnight)
- Tide
- High water around 09:00, before slack
- Water clarity
- Clear
- Lure
- JetChaser / EgiSharp
- Method
- Eging (shore)
Beyond the Video
“Jet eging,” the phrase Azuma uses in the video, is not something coined on the spot. It is what the JetChaser product page calls it, and the reasoning behind the lure is written there too: as the sea starts to cool, bait fish are at their most active point of the year, and “you often see good bigfin reef squid, switched on to feeding, chasing fast-moving bait.” The JetChaser was built to imitate that bait.
So the conclusion the video reaches on the water — in autumn, go and find the bait — and the intent behind the product start from the same premise. One arrives at it in a harbour at dawn; the other states it in advance as a design rationale. Only the order differs.
The Lure's Role
JetChaser
Size 2.5 (20 g) and size 2.6 (22 g). Very small, yet heavy, with a high-buoyancy hard-foam urethane body that holds the tension-stay posture. Because it sinks quickly, the bottom stays findable from a high stand or in fast current. The crown is the KS06 — the hook normally fitted to size 3.5 to 4.0 egi, on a size 2.5 body.
Overnight rain meant colour in the water and a drop in temperature were both expected, which is why a harbour with good tidal flow was chosen. Against a plan of covering ground in moving current while repeatedly re-finding the bottom, a fast sink rate works in the direction of shortening each cast. Being able to step carefully from the base of the breakwater towards the tip early on plausibly rests on that saved time.
EgiSharp
Sizes 3.5 and 3.8, developed in 2007 by the late Genzo Kanagawa, the founder, as an egi that would go beyond the traditional Oita form. At its centre are a sharp profile that pushes high-buoyancy hard-foam urethane resin to its limit, and the KS06 crown, designed from scratch for this lure. Four fall speeds are offered: V0 (ultra slow), V0+ (slow), V1 (standard) and V2 (fast).
“Change the sink rate,” one of the three moves named in the video, is something you can carry out by swapping lures precisely because four fall speeds exist within a single size. And the JetChaser in size 2.5 (20 g) is close to the weight of an ordinary size 3.5 egi — near the 17 g of the EgiSharp 3.5 V1 — with both carrying the same KS06 crown. That the pair can be swapped without changing how the cast feels is what makes it useful on a day spent searching for the conditions.
From the Workshop in Arita
The egi used in this video are made at the KEYSTONE factory in Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan.
The EgiSharp of 2007, and the JetChaser built for autumn from the shore. Two lures of different design and different size, carrying the same KS06 crown. Off-the-shelf crowns come in too few specifications, and performance hits a ceiling there — for that one reason the hook was designed in-house, and it has been fitted ever since. Both are made in Arita.
MADE TODAY IN ARITA
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