Hi Earl
Again, I'll preface my comments with the fact that I am a terrible and in fact, disgraceful jigger. The only reason I catch fish when I jig is because either the fishing Gods feel sorry for me or the fish think whatever the jig is that I am using is so sick that it deserves to be killed. I wish the rest of the guys who actually know how to jig would respond to jigging questions!
From my experience and observations (and I have absolutely no empirical evidence to support this), I'll split doggies into two populations which is monster class (over 80kgs or so) and the rest. The monster class fish seem to react well to large slow jigs for some reason. The rest seem to react to speed. Whether you use a long or short stroke, it feels to me like the faster you can get that jig moving, the more likely you are to hook up. Personally, I think that if you like the long stroke, you're better off with a longer rod for the simple reason that the stroke is longer and you can really give that jig a rip.
If you're really serious about huge monster class doggies, you can't go past a live mack tuna or equivalent about 2-3kg in weight but of course, that is not jigging. I have to admit though that while I've hooked bloody heaps of big doggies, I've never been successful in actually getting a true monster class fish to the surface. They just end up doing terrible things to my braid and swim off with another jig. This is probably as much a reflection of my jigging ability as of the difficulty of trying to extract a really big fish from a tough area.
What I will say is that if you can fish really heavy braid on a brutal drag setting, you just may be able to slow a huge fish down enough to prevent it getting its head down. Good luck!!
