by Zach Harvey
Here in life after deck, an admittedly awkward point in my fishing/writing career when I’m trying to remember how to fish for fun and relaxation, I’ve found a new form of major amusement grilling my fellow rod-and-reelers wherever I find them about the most tedious, impossibly technical, or flat-out unknowable pieces of the fish-catching puzzle. This new, semi-sadistic pastime has unearthed some spectacularly ornate and often hilarious explanations for common fishing situations—the best ones generally coming from the frontiers of marine psychology, where my fellow striper or tuna hunters delve into all the “why’s” of the target species’ emotional lives, sensory experiences, or behavioral tendencies.
My own perverse amusement aside, my recent hours alongside the part of the angling public with a healthy mix of normal-people hobbies and interests has served as a refresher course on what an aspiring sport fisherman wants/needs to figure out to move the catch-to-skunking ratio in the right direction. I’ve realized how strange and esoteric my own fishing interests have become over the last 20 years or so, and, nearer the point of this month’s column, remembered a couple of the key things it took years to drive through my concrete skull—the building blocks that support the weight of all I’ve learned since.
No matter how salty the breeze where we exit the womb, we are all born flatlanders. The curse of the beginner is that he has no frame of reference to tell a genuine expert from a blowhard with an ear for jargon. Whereas the loudmouth makes it his goal to enshroud what he knows in serious technical complexity—makes it look or sound hard—a legit expert fisherman will not only make it look easy, but can boil even tougher concepts down, make the learning comparatively easy.
Of course, some aspects of hook-and-line fishing are a little tricky, and absolute truths are mighty scarce on the fisherman’s ocean. Learning the various roles of tide in fishing success takes time and observation, but we all realize early and often that tide stage, the speed of tidal current—timing relative to the ebb and flow—has an undeniable and unavoidable impact on what we do or don’t catch.
Other variables, from the perspective of the novice, have less tangible effects on fishing success. The study of moons or certain weather patterns, for example, will yield useful info—sometimes. It’s all these sometimes rules that give striper fishing, say, or tuna trolling, an air of impenetrable complexity. The trick, in the earliest, steepest legs of the learning curve, is to maintain a critical ear for which details matter, which contribute to head clutter.
Having spent numerous recent hours trying to help a couple of friends begin to untangle the role of moons in big-bass fishing, I thought that might be worth a few paragraphs here. In my own fishing education, moons seldom made it into the lessons. But I heard about such-and-such new moon, or “fishing up the moon” in such-and-such month, constantly—to the extent I felt like a moron because I couldn’t find any real causal relationships between moon phase and lights-out fishing. That would come much later. And when I did finally see it, I kicked myself for weeks.
I mention moons because I’ve heard quite a few guys talk about the moon with the familiar pained facial expressions men wear when they know a detail is important but can’t for the life of them explain why that is so. So, in an effort to balance the karmic scales after playing Spanish Inquisition around the docks, I’d like to use this space to shed light on some ways a novice can harness lunar cycles for the good of his/her catch stats.
First thing to know about moons is that the primary, most significant correlation between moons and big striped bass is the moon as the driving force in tidal cycles. That is, it’s not some property of a full or new moon that puts stripers on the feed. Rather, it’s the impact the moon’s position relative to earth, and the earth’s and moon’s position relative to the sun, that create our tides—more specifically the tidal cycles. To be clear, it’s not just the moon’s position relative to the earth’s rotation on its axis—the roughly 24-hour cycle of ebb and flood tides and the slacks (high and low) in between periods of tidal flow (two highs and two lows, two floods and two ebbs in a full day).
Although tide stage on a single-day scale can mean the difference between putting a hurt on big fish and simply putting a hurt on your fuel tank and/or lower back, what an experienced striperman means when he references the moon is the second of three overlapping lunar cycles. This is a roughly 28-day cycle with two periods of dramatically increased tide height around the two “moons” (the full and new, or dark, moons) and weaker tides (below average tide height/velocity) on the quarters of the moon—all created by the moon’s revolution around the earth.
When a surfcaster speaks of fishing “up” or “down” the moon—full or new—he means fishing the last four or six days as the moon waxes toward full (up) or the same starting on the moon and fishing some number of days as it wanes (down). Peak tidal velocities on a 28-day cycle will occur on the nights of the full or new moons.
To be clear, the biggest tides in a given month can fall on either the new or full moon, but that’s controlled by yet another layer of lunar influence: The earth’s and the moon’s position in Earth’s 12-month orbit around the sun. Within a 12-month cycle, the relative height/ strength during the new or full moons will fluctuate according to the earth’s relative distance from the sun, but also the interplay between the pull of the moon, the pull of the sun, and the angle of Earth a la its angle as it rotates on its axis. At points when the pull of sun and pull of moon align, we get moons with the year’s greatest tidal range—the highest high (i.e. spring) tides, and the lowest lows. (Or, viewed from a fishing perspective, these “astronomical” tides, with the greatest difference between slack high and low, translate to extreme tidal current velocity—sometimes, in certain areas, an addition 2 knots or more of current added to the normal full- or new-moon peaks in the 28-day cycle.
To fully absorb the three cycles as they play out, you really need to log some hours poring over Eldridge or another annual tide book that provides current velocity along with times of high or low tide.
Astronomy, physics, or hydrodynamics lessons aside, it’s the fish—the way they respond to a given day’s total tidal influences. Although, under certain tide and weather conditions, an unusually bright full moon can, some maintain, play a major hand in your fishing success, the moon’s impact on catch rate has to do with the way fish react to change over the course of the 28-day wax/wane cycle—and not some aesthetic feature of the moon in the night sky.
Some known constants in fish behavior can help you leverage the moons (tides) in your hunt for plus-size striped bass. As a rule, fish will school up/concentrate and feed, as they do during migration periods, on the moons (ergo, during the biggest tides of a month). Another rule is that migratory schools of striped bass, among other species, will do their open-water, long-distance travel when they can swim fair-tide. Big schools of Chesapeake Bay cows usually pull in at Block Island on the last June or first July moon. To further bear out Mother Nature’s distaste for inefficiency, long-distance migrations will also usually coincide with stronger-than-the-monthly average (i.e. astronomical) tides—bass taking advantage of every available sort of energy savings.
To narrow variables of timing further, the biggest bass will tend to be most cooperative on or around the moons. In known striper strongholds like the Watch Hill Reefs of Block Island’s SW Corner, timing your drifts or trolling passes to coincide with slow-but-still-moving current coming into or out of slack on the month’s strongest tides.
Next month, a deeper look at moons, current, weather, and other pieces of sound timing.
by Zach Harvey
