Wednesday and Thursday – you must go fishing!

[Fish_Eye]

Realizing that this Wednesday is the dreaded full moon, I still think that Wednesday night and especially Thursday night will be the nights to catch lots of large striped bass.

When it comes to fishing I usually hate the full moon because most of the time the fishing sucks. I’ve asked dozens of charter captains from around the world what they though about fishing during a full moon and they’re close to unanimous in their opinion that it’s a terrible time to fish. So why am I so psyched to get a line in the water on Wednesday or Thursday night? First of all, most charter captains fish during the day and not at night; secondly, they feel that the fishing is off during the day because the fish feed heavily at night. I don’t necessarily feel that the fish feed all night long, but I do believe that at certain stages of the moon and tide they do feed heavily.

This Wednesday brings on an especially significant full moon, one that is at perigee. The moon will appear to be very large because it will be 30,000 km closer to the earth than it was in February. Therefore the full moon effects will be even more significant, both good and bad. On the positive side, areas that light up during high tide will be flooded with even more water to draw stripers onto the shoreline. On the negative side, there is often a lot of grass pulled into the water by the higher tides which makes fishing certain plugs more difficult.

On Thursday night the tides will be high in the Newport area around the time of sunset – another factor that should contributes to a heavy bite at dusk. The way I see it, the fishing should be dynamite just before and after sunset. Then it will be time to grab a bite to eat, catch a cat nap and then move to another area in time for the hottest bite of the morning, just as the moon goes into transition at 1:06 a.m. If there is anything to the solunar calendar and when maximum feeding should occur, it will be from just before 1:00 till around 3:30 a.m. – with a low tide at 2:09.

There are two other significant things that should be triggered by this particular full moon – the start of the mullet run and the beginning of the striped bass migration.

I’ll be teaming up on Thursday night with DJ Muller, a talented surf fisherman and writer, and hopefully Steve McKenna and the infamous #^&#^&#^&#^&#^&#^&. It will be interesting to film these guys as they work Slug-Gos, wooden lures and of course eels. Last time we got together Steve produced a 40 pound fish…who knows what will happen this time…if we get skunked we can always blame it on the moon.

The only reason I feel Thursday (the day after the full moon) will be the better day/night is because the weather forecast calls for rain on Wednesday and that could pull even more weeds into the water.

Hopefully these are good enough reasons to get some of you folks out there fishing.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how the moon has impacted your past fishing trips.

I would also be interested in seeing some follow up posts by anglers that fish Wednesday night through Friday morning.

Finally, you can print this out and hand it to your wife, boss, or significant other and say, “I have to go fishing, it says so right here.”