How California's Micro Jig Scene Started | Submission Fishing Co. Orig

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In the spring of 2020, the world shut down and Mike Muto went kayak fishing.

Not as an escape. Not as a coping mechanism. As a serious angler doing what serious anglers do when the offshore party boats stop running — he figured out what was still biting and went after it.

San Diego Bay. Mission Bay. La Jolla Cove. The tricky surf launch at Carlsbad when the swell cooperated.

Before any of this, you should know something about Muto. He's a lifelong angler and a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Those two things are not unrelated.

BJJ is a discipline built on the idea that technical mastery beats raw athleticism. The practitioner who understands the mechanics — the leverage, the timing, the read of an opponent — consistently beats the one who just tries harder. You earn your rank through repetition, honest assessment of what went wrong, and the willingness to refine until the technique actually works under pressure.

Muto fishes the same way. Which is why, when the offshore boats stopped running, he didn't pick up a different hobby. He went deeper into the craft.

The target was spotted bay bass — the most competitive, most technical inshore species in Southern California. Tight to structure. Pressure-sensitive. The kind of fish that punishes lazy presentations and rewards anglers who've done the work to understand them. Tournament fish. The ones nobody keeps, everybody chases, and almost nobody catches consistently.

Muto was chasing them with a Japanese technique called slow pitch jigging — a vertical method most California anglers hadn't heard of yet. The technique was built for exactly these fish: neutral, structure-hugging, not interested in chasing anything aggressive. The slow fall, the deliberate pause, the horizontal flutter — all of it was designed for fish that had already decided not to cooperate.

It worked. The jigs, on the other hand, needed serious work.

The Problem With Every Jig in the Store

Slow pitch jigging requires specific jig design. The balance point, weight distribution, and hook configuration all affect how the jig falls — and the fall is the whole technique.

The jigs available at big-box stores in 2020 weren't built for vertical slow pitch applications. They were casting jigs. Designed to be retrieved horizontally, rigged with treble hooks meant to catch fish attacking from the side.

Muto and his crew were buying them anyway, pulling the treble hooks off, and rigging their own single and double assist hooks for vertical jigging. It was the only way to get the hook configuration right for the technique.

The problem was everything else. Balance. Profile. Weight distribution. The jig that worked on a horizontal retrieve behaved differently on a vertical fall. Sometimes the flutter was wrong. Sometimes the hook position wasn't right for the way the fish were eating. Sometimes the paint was gone after a few sessions on the rocks.

Every trip was a field test. Every lost fish was data.

Muto was sharing all of it live — weekly one-hour YouTube shows where he broke down what he was learning in real time, answered questions from the chat, and walked anglers through the technique, the gear, and the adjustments that were making the difference. Short how-to videos after every kayak session. A couple of years of building an audience that actually wanted to understand the method, not just see the catches.

The audience kept asking the same question: where do I get the right jig?

Muto didn't have a good answer. So he decided to build one.

Making the Jig That Didn't Exist

The first step was finding someone who could make it right.

Submission Fishing Co. started with a collaboration with an expert international jig maker and built on fine tuning specifics: balance point, body geometry, hook configuration, finish quality, and the fall action that the technique required.

Then came the sizes that everyone wanted.

The micro weights — 10g and 15g — weren't widely available. The market for micro slow pitch jigs in those sizes essentially didn't exist outside of Japan. Muto knew the San Diego bay fishery well enough to know those weights would be the most productive for spotted bay bass and structure fish in 20 to 40 feet of water. So they built them.

The same process happened with the heavier profile jigs. A 400g design got scaled down to 80g, then down further to create the Micro Ogre Jr. — the world's smallest knife-style slow pitch jig. Each size was not just a scaled version of the original. It was tested against the specific behavior of the fish it was designed to catch, with prostaff running it through real sessions on real water before anything was finalized.

The finish work was its own discipline. Paint, glow, foil, and 3D-printed elements combined to create colorways that performed under the specific light conditions of San Diego's bays — the kind of water color and clarity decisions that only come from fishing those spots enough times to understand what actually triggers a bite versus what looks good in a product photo.

Every jig that came out of that process was rigged exactly the way Muto wanted it — assist hooks sized and positioned for vertical presentation, ready to fish out of the package without modification.

That last part mattered. The whole reason this started was because no jig on the market was ready to fish the way this technique required. The goal was to make one that was.

Why the Bay Bass Fishery Made Better Jigs

Spotted bay bass are an ideal test subject for jig design.

They're not easy fish. They hold in specific structure — dock pilings, rocky points, kelp edges — and they don't move far to eat. The presentation has to come to them. In tournament fishing, where every fish counts and the margin between winning and losing is often one bite, there's no room for a jig that only works sometimes.

Muto was fishing Mission Bay and San Diego Bay regularly enough to build the kind of sample size that actually tells you something. Not "caught fish on it once." Consistently producing fish across changing tide, light, and pressure conditions, on fish that had seen a lot of tackle.

Sand bass and calicos added another dimension — species that behave differently, eat differently, and required slight adjustments to cadence and presentation that fed back into how the jigs were designed and weighted.

Halibut on the bottom. Corvina on the sand. Sheephead around rocks. Each species added to the picture of what a truly versatile micro jig needed to do — and where the limits of any single design were.

The San Diego bay fishery is, by necessity, a technical fishery. The fish are pressured. The water is clear. The structure is well-known and well-fished. If a jig design works consistently in that environment, it works. There's no luck involved at the scale Muto was fishing.

That confidence in the design is what made it possible to launch a brand around it.

spotted bay bass on spottie jig

From San Diego Bays to Every Fishery in the Country

The micro jig sizes that came out of those COVID-era bay sessions — 10g and 15g — turned out to work far beyond San Diego.

Freshwater bass anglers started running them on deep structure. Trout fishermen picked them up for lake applications. Inshore saltwater anglers found they produced in tidal creeks, around docks, and in the kind of shallow structure where heavier jigs were too much. Stripers. Walleye. Crappie. Species nobody had originally designed for were eating these jigs because the fall action was right for any fish that ambushes from structure.

The technique travels. The jig travels with it.

What started as a solution to a very specific problem — catching competitive spotted bay bass in San Diego during a pandemic with a Japanese technique and no appropriate gear — became a product that anglers across the country use because the design decisions that made it work in the hardest conditions make it work everywhere else too.

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Why the Brand Is Called Submission Fishing Co.

When it came time to name the company, the answer wasn't hard.

In jiu-jitsu, a submission is how a match ends. It's the moment one practitioner has so thoroughly mastered position, leverage, and timing that the opponent has no choice but to tap. The fish is the opponent. The submission is the bite. The jig is the technique.

It's also a reference to the process. To get good at jiu-jitsu, you have to submit — to the learning, to the losses, to the discomfort of being a white belt again every time you face a better opponent. Every angler who has seriously tried to improve their fishing knows the same feeling. The fish are not impressed by your confidence. They respond only to competence.

Submission Fishing Co. is for the anglers who are willing to submit to the process of getting better.

The logo makes that explicit. A slow pitch jig — the tool — combined with the lapel of a martial arts gi. The gi is what you wear when you're on the mat doing the work. The jig is what you tie on when you're on the water doing the same.

The two images together say everything about what this brand is for and who it's built for. It's not for casual fishermen looking for a lucky lure. It's for anglers who treat the water the way a black belt treats the mat — with respect, with preparation, and with the understanding that the only way to get better is to keep showing up.

Why Every Design Decision Still Starts Here

Submission Fishing Co. still operates the same way it started — every jig design decision comes from fishing, not from a product catalog.

New sizes, new profiles, new colorways — all of it runs through prostaff testing in real conditions before it ships. The same questions Muto was asking in 2020 on San Diego Bay are the same questions every new jig has to answer: Does it fall correctly? Does it communicate? Does it catch fish that other jigs don't catch?

Earning a black belt in jiu-jitsu takes years of deliberate practice — not just showing up, but paying close attention to what works, what doesn't, and why. The jig development process runs the same way. Every fish lost to a bad hook. Every trip where the fall was wrong. Every modification that didn't work before the one that did — that's the curriculum.

Muto has been on that mat in both disciplines for a long time. The standard that came out of it is simple: the jig has to be ready to fish out of the package, because it's already been tested in conditions where being almost right isn't good enough.

That's still the standard.

The Fishing Tip From the Story

FISHING TIP

Slow pitch is not a speed contest. Give the jig room to fall after each lift. The slack is where the action happens.

Every bite Muto tracked during those early bay sessions confirmed it: the fish weren't eating on the lift. They were eating in the pause. The moment the jig transitioned from rising to falling — that moment of slack, when the jig kicked sideways and started its flutter — was the trigger.

Most anglers crank through that moment. They feel the slack and assume nothing is happening.

Something is always happening in the slack.