SportFishing and Charters Forum - Jigmaster = Big Fish?

What is the biggest fish you've caught with your Penn Jigmaster? Present or past catches. A brief story and/or photo would be cool.

Thanx, Kevin.

Had caught lots of stripers blues and fluke and the good old jig master. Sent mine back to Penn a year ago for new drag and it is like brand new. Even caught Bonita with it on the troll years back when I was still putting together my trolling rod spread. Biggiest fish caught with mine was a 35 pound drum. Some time around midnight on the Delaware bay off Slaughter beach. Heard them suckers drumming under the boat for a solid hour.

http://i850.photobucket.com/albums/ab67/cooterscrazy/IMG_2899.jpg

I have a full-bore custom Jigmaster that hasn't been used on the water for nearly 25 years now. With a Newell spool, braces, reelseat, and a carefully tuned drag it has the works. In 1976 it was used to take a 35lb African Pompano off the old Lake Worth fishing pier (and it was used to take numerous sailfish with 15 or20lb line back then as well). That African was taken on 15lb line and would have been an all tackle record - except for one small detail.... The IGFA didn't list Africans as a record specie until five years later (give or take). It took another five to ten years before they posted on bigger than mine...

That's the reason that old reel is still with me. I just don't have the heart to part with it.

Sometime in the mid-1980's (when the big Bluefish were running off NJ), I pulled a 27 lb Bluefish and a crap load more in the 22-25 lb range on one of mine. I still have both Jigmasters (which were bought in the late 1970's), but I haven't fished with them since some time in the very early 1990's - they were replaced by a Shimano TLD-10's (which I also still have), which were replaced in 2008 by Penn 975CSLD. Comparing them, the 500M's were great reels in the 1960's, but nowhere near as good as what we fish today.