Hey team

So after over a year and half of humming and harring I’ve decided to commit and start targeting kingies.


I have only every fished softbaits or stay lined and after watching hundreds of hours of videos, reading countless articles and scouring forums I am more confused than I was before on jigging and what setup I will need.


I fish from a 4meter stabi so don’t head out wide. I took a mate our recently and used his setup to land couple kings and I think I’m hooked.

I have around 700-1300$ but this would include jigs, braid etc basically everything ready to go.

But to make things more confusing I would also like to buy a second rod to fish top water aswell.

My basic questions are can I just buy one spin reel and have two rods and do both jigging and flick stick baits or poppers?

If so would the Saragossa 10,000 be a good real for this as it’s in my price range.

Or is it better to just bite the bullet and buy both a top water and jigging setup? And if so does anyone have any recommendations for both that won’t break the bank.

Will 50lb braid be enough for most inshore kingies?

I checked through the forums to make sure this hasn’t been asked before.
Cheers

50lb braid will be heaps for inshore fish. For a long time this was about your average PE4-PE5 setup, and heaps of kings have been caught with this sort of gear, especially if it's quality. You can pull unbelievably hard on quality 50lb braid... run a longer leader if you're worried about getting reefed.

The Saragosa 10000 is a good mid-budget jigging reel and well matched to that 50lb sort of level. It's a PG (Power Gear) reel though, and would be considered very slow by any serious topwater angler.

Conversely you could get the 14000 XG (Xtra High Gear) which has a retrieve much better suited to topwater but will be hard to get a good rhythm with when jigging. Ideally... one of each. If I could only choose one, probably the 10000, although I don't do enough topwater to really comment, just seems to me that you could compensate for the slower retrieve by winding faster, whereas with the mechanical jigging action you are limited to exactly the retrieve you get from one turn of the handle.

Rod, probably a Jig Star Ninja ML (PE3-6), although if you're confident in your angling a L (PE2-5) would be a lot of fun and will jig a 200g jig better than the ML does, especially if you're primarily fishing shallower areas.

Braid, Shimano Kairiki or J-Braid 8x is good value for money and strong stuff. No need for anything exotic if you don't really need the capacity or strength.