Moon Phases and Bass Fishing Part 6
Published on Bassmaster.com October 22, 2009
If you haven't read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, read them first.
For the final article of this series, we will look at when giant bass have been caught in relation to the moon phases. It would be nice if I had the top 50 bass from every state in a database, but I don't have that information. What I do have in my database is the top 10 bass of all time, the Texas top 50, and my personal top 50 bass. I realize I've gone chart crazy in this series, but I don't think there's a better way to get a good look at the data. I believe the charts are self-explanatory. I took the 3 stats separately and put them in their moon phase category. See charts below.
The top 50 bass recorded in the world are all over 20 pounds. The Texas top 50 are all over 15 pounds. My personal top 50 bass are all over 10 pounds. By most people's standards, these are all giants. The patterns are pretty inconsistent, but there does seem to be a trend that goes up as the moon gets fuller and down when the moons get smaller. The charts are very easy to figure the average for each phase because there are 10 phases total. That makes an average of one fish on the top 10 bass in the world and five for the top 50 charts. That may help you see which phases are above and below average for each graph.
The 3/4 waxing moon is the only period with more than one fish (3 fish) recorded for the top 10 bass in the world. The other periods all have one fish or less. For that period (3/4 waxing), the Texas top 50 and my own personal stats show to be better than average. However, for almost every period, the stats from one chart will contradict the others. There are only four other periods that show any kind of consistency — and they are all average to below average. None of the periods have less than average recordings for all three databases. But the first three waxing periods are average or less and the half moon waning is less than average to average. Ten of my top 50 fish were caught on the new moon waning, which is twice the average. However, the Texas top 50 only has two fish recorded for the new moon waning.
I've learned a lot about moon phases and bass fishing in my research for these articles. I hope you have benefitted as well. We've really covered a lot of material. Let's recap what we've learned. In this post, we found that for giants, the best period of all is the 3/4 waxing moon. Both sides of the full moon are better than average based on most of the stats. The half moons aren't as good. Additionally, the new moons are not quite as good as the full moons, but they do seem to be better than the half moons.
In previous posts, we found that catches are quite different depending on the season and time of day. In the summer, the full moon seems to be the best period at night, but one of the worst times for day fishing. For fish over 5 pounds, the full moon seems to be best in the fall according to the Insider BASSlog, but not for the other seasons. From my own logs of fish over 7 pounds, the 3/4 waning moon is my best period. The only exception to this is the fall season.
We also broke the catches from the Insider BASSlog down into season and time of day. We didn't see any substantial trends. But, it does show that some periods are better than others and that differs based on the season.
We also looked at moon phase terminology and the phases of the moon both from the earth's perspective and by what is actually happening. We learned that you can tell the future phases by the term DOC. We learned that while some may be slightly better than others, there isn't really a super bad moon phase. You can catch both good numbers and quality fish on any phase. We also learned that the more data we have, the more accurate and consistent our trends will be.
We didn't get into solar/lunar tables because after breaking down all the data into seasons and times of day, there wasn't quite enough data to get an accurate sampling. You can help make that possible in future articles by posting your stats in the Basslog. I hope you benefitted from this series.