How many times have you gotten up early to be the first boat on the lake, and then motor to your favorite spot in pitch darkness only to find the bass won’t even think about biting until daylight?
Even if the fish don’t bite in the darkness, you still need to be there very early to catch as much of that early bite as possible. The same thing happens when you fish late in the evenings. The fish can be eating the paint off your baits, but when the sun is gone and the lake is in total darkness the bite stops just as abruptly as it started just before the sun went down.
What is up with this? Is Okeechobee really that bad of a night-fishing lake. When I lived in Tennessee, we did a lot of night fishing in the summer, and it was great. Here on the Big O, the difference is we are usually fishing very shallow grassy water. In the daylight, all that grass is producing oxygen. When the light goes out, photosynthesis does not occur, and it seems just like the whole lake just goes to sleep.
Now this is not to say that you can’t catch bass at night, but the shallow grassy areas are probably not the places you need to be fishing. The river or rim canals, or maybe the deep dynamite holes, might be a better option because these places don’t have all that grass pumping out oxygen all day long.
Here is another observation: How many times have you been catching fish just before a storm and when the rains came the fish stopped biting? This has happened to me many times on Okeechobee, and I never really understood why.
When I have a question that I don’t have the answer to, I go the experts. My friend Butch, who has done a lot of research on the effects of rainfall, asked me this, “just what is rain?” Rain is highly oxygenated water and is usually a lot colder than the water in the lake. When all this cold water falls in bucket loads on the warm lake water, it falls quickly to the bottom of the lake. Just what this does to the fish, I don’t know, the only thing I do know is the bite usually stops.
There are a lot of things that we know and understand about our lakes and the fish we are trying to catch, but it is all the things we don’t know that make fishing the challenging sport it is. We never stop trying to figure out Mother Nature, but there will always be things we will never know.
An Extremely successful professional bass tournament angler, Steve Daniel is a 30-plus-year veteran Okeechobee guide and the voice of Okeechobee fishing on WRVO Radio Network 1’s Hooked up with Steve and Deb. Check out the show at www.renoviolaoutdoors.com. Contact Steve at stevedaniel84@yahoo.com or 239-560-2704.