Your Latest Opinion: Solunar Calendars

[Bluebasser86]

I went Friday when it was supposed to be one of the best lunar phases of the month during one of the best bite windows of the day, I caught a white bass. 

 

Don't think I'll be looking at them in the future. 

[22RangerZ520R]

I always plan my trips around the full or new moon...

[A-Jay]

I am a believer - in both full & new moon phases. 

 While I fish when I can,  when 'the moon is right',  I'll admit to having higher expectations.

Fished the blackest new moon nights for both salt & sweet water bass with decent results for a long time. 

My last trip to Mexico was scheduled almost a year in advance to include a full moon right in the middle of week long stay.   Turned out to be the best big fish experience of my life.  Was it the moon ?  Who knows. 

But you can bet that I'll be back there same time this year. (already booked it)

I have also had many complete skunkings during these times. 

Moon might have nothing or everything to do with either one. 

A-Jay

 

[WRB]

I am a believer during the warm water pre spawn through post spawn cycle and the summer period, the fall and cold water winter not so much unless the weather warming cycle coincides, cold water tends to affect everything in the basses world.

Tom

 

[Catt]

I'm a firm believer that there are to many other variables involved to say with any amount of specificity which moon phase is better.

 

When planning a trip to the Big Pond in March everyone involved said let Tommy T pick the date. I selected the 18, 19, & 20; some would assume I picked those dates because of the full moon. In reality the 18th is Monday & most weekend warriors leave Sunday evening & return on Thursday or Friday. 

 

To many times everything should have been right & fishing stunk!

 

To many times everything should have been wrong & we smoked em!

[Mobasser]

I fish when I can. If I can go during a moon cycle then so be it. But I can't honestly say it's made a big difference either way.

[Mobasser]

1 hour ago, Catt said:

I'm a firm believer that there are to many other variables involved to say with any amount of specificity which moon phase is better.

 

When planning a trip to the Big Pond in March everyone involved said let Tommy T pick the date. I selected the 18, 19, & 20; some would assume I picked those dates because of the full moon. In reality the 18th is Monday & most weekend warriors leave Sunday evening & return on Thursday or Friday. 

 

To many times everything should have been right & fishing stunk!

 

To many times everything should have been wrong & we smoked em!

Catt, for me 3 days of consistent weather has proven to be a better indicator of good fishing, regardless of the season

[Dirtyeggroll]

1 hour ago, Catt said:

In reality the 18th is Monday & most weekend warriors leave Sunday evening & return on Thursday or Friday. 

In Josh Alwine’s book based on the ShareLunker data, one of the strongest signals was that Wednesday was the day when the most amount of fish were caught.

[Catt]

15 minutes ago, Mobasser said:

Catt, for me 3 days of consistent weather has proven to be a better indicator of good fishing, regardless of the season

 

15 minutes ago, Dirtyeggroll said:

In Josh Alwine’s book based on the ShareLunker data, one of the strongest signals was that Wednesday was the day when the most amount of fish were caught.

 

If any of the 4 moon phases occurs during that three days of "stable" conditions & the middle day happens to be on a Wednesday... I'm probably gonna be on the lake!

 

The ShareLunker data is based mainly during pre-spawn/spawn periods. With the massive amounts of weekend warriors on the water at this time it's easy to see Wednesday as the better day.

[Dirtyeggroll]

12 minutes ago, Catt said:

 

 

If any of the 4 moon phases occurs during that three days of "stable" conditions & the middle day happens to be on a Wednesday... I'm probably gonna be on the lake!

 

The ShareLunker data is based mainly during pre-spawn/spawn periods. With the massive amounts of weekend warriors on the water at this time it's easy to see Wednesday as the better day.

Yes but these data “contradict” the idea, to paraphrase, that “more people people on the water = more fish caught”... And although I didn’t see the exact statistical algorithms he used for his analysis, this suggests he used a method to factor in/control for number of anglers fishing. He didn’t talk about in depth in his book because it would probably be alphabet soup for most of the audience he was targeting, but I would be interested in knowing more about how he performed the analyses.

I do however, have some faith that he only presented data that had very robust signals in multivariate analysis.

 

These type of analyses are decent at telling us what is happening, but it is not good at telling us why.

[Mobasser]

19 minutes ago, Catt said:

 

 

If any of the 4 moon phases occurs during that three days of "stable" conditions & the middle day happens to be on a Wednesday... I'm probably gonna be on the lake!

 

The ShareLunker data is based mainly during pre-spawn/spawn periods. With the massive amounts of weekend warriors on the water at this time it's easy to see Wednesday as the better day.

I agree. One lake near us, the shallows get pounded on Sat and Sun. It only makes sense your odds are better on a Wed. Especially in spring- when everyone's a bass fisherman

[Catt]

12 minutes ago, Dirtyeggroll said:

Yes but these data “contradict” the idea, to paraphrase, that “more people people on the water = more fish caught”.

 

Once again we need to look at details not mentioned!

 

By sheer numbers of anglers there will an increase in bass caught. I think the reason for the increase of big bass caught on Wednesday is not only due to less traffic but the anglers fishing during mid-week are better anglers.

[Mobasser]

6 minutes ago, Catt said:

 

Once again we need to look at details not mentioned!

 

By sheer numbers of anglers there will an increase in bass caught. I think the reason for the increase of big bass caught on Wednesday is not only due to less traffic but the anglers fishing during mid-week are better anglers.

Yes. These are the guys who may take a day off work- or schedule their trip for mid week, just to avoid the weekend warriors. I'm sure most would be better fisherman too

[22RangerZ520R]

10 minutes ago, Catt said:

 

Once again we need to look at details not mentioned!

 

By sheer numbers of anglers there will an increase in bass caught. I think the reason for the increase of big bass caught on Wednesday is not only due to less traffic but the anglers fishing during mid-week are better anglers.

I avoid the weekends like the plague, I fish Mon-Thu 99% of the time.  The only time I fish the weekend is during my long trips up north or elsewhere that are 7+ days long and I can't avoid it...

[roadwarrior]

https://www.bassresource.com/hank-parker-fishing/solunar-moon-times-fishing.html

[Deeare]

I use the tables as much as I can...

 

me:   Honey, I know I told you I’d work on my honey-do list Sunday BUT it’s the best day to fish this month!!!!   Just look at this table!!!!

 

[jpurdue]

Josh Alwine here.  Author of High Percentage Fishing.  The ShareLunker data was just a small drop in the bucket of the overall data I looked at.  I wrote that book over three years ago, so I'd have to pull up the old files to tell you the exact number, but as I recall the ShareLunker data was something like 600 data points compared to the whole sample set that was over 40,000 catches.  The rest of the data came from clubs, and other sources like the Toledo Bend lunker club.  Data points were from all over the country as well.  I won't bore you with the a bunch of statistical jargon, but with a sample set that size you can reliably draw some really powerful conclusions.  

 

All my data was adjusted for angling effort.  By far and away, the most fish are caught on the weekends.  However that's when the vast majority of people are fishing, so angling effort is also at it's highest.  In terms of fish caught per angling hour though, weekends are actually the worst time to fish.  If you are looking at the number of fish caught per angling hour, Wednesdays are the best day. The basic thesis of my book is that when you normalize all the data and then take all the variables into account, fishing pressure turns out to be the single biggest factor when it comes to the catch rates (fish caught per angling hour).  In all but the most extreme cases it matters more than barometric pressure, lunar phase, cloud cover, etc...  Anyway, that's the short version, I wrote a whole book on it if you are looking for more detail!  Tight lines gents.

[fissure_man]

On ‎1‎/‎18‎/‎2019 at 5:15 PM, Team9nine said:

What would be extremely challenging (IMO) is factoring out for the influence of poor decision making on the part of the angler. To what degree would the conclusion accurately reflect the effect of the solunar tables (times) while excluding for the angler biases (locations, baits, etc.)?

 

Very delayed reply -

 

Agreed that it would be difficult to exclude these factors and that they will strongly influence an individual’s catch rates on any given day - the problem is in quantifying them. However, I think it’s fair to assume that the anglers’ decisions aren’t correlated in any way with solunar times, so although the noise from these factors would obscure any solunar influence, it shouldn’t introduce a consistent bias.  For example: an angler’s lucky hot streak coincidentally aligning with a solunar peak would skew the findings for a that day, but if the solunar influence is a myth then you would expect the occurrence of these streaks to be equally likely at any other time (including non-peak times), so the average effect measured over a sufficiently large data set should trend toward zero. On the other hand, if the data did indicate a statistically significant increased likelihood of ‘hot streaks’ happening during solunar peaks, that would be an interesting finding.

 

Having results from multiple anglers fishing the same lake/time/conditions is a big advantage of the MLF data – right away this could help to smooth the noise in individuals’ catch rates. I would skip looking at results for individual anglers, and instead evaluate the overall catch rates for all active anglers on a given day.  If the solunar theories are valid and have any meaningful impact on fishing success, then through the noise we should expect to see a tendency toward increased average catch rates during the ‘best’ fishing times. I would maybe break up each day into peak and off-peak fishing windows (keep it simple), and for each day come up with a relative statement like: “average catch rates during peak fishing times were XX% higher/lower than average catch rates during off-peak fishing times.” 

  

After applying the above process for many days of MLF fishing (and keeping in mind that each ‘day’ is actually the averaged day of multiple anglers), you could look for a trend – is there an overall difference in catch rates between peak and off-peak fishing times?

 

The larger the dataset, the smaller the solunar influence which could be detected (or conversely, ruled out) using the above approach and following appropriate statistical rigor. I would still fully expect to find no significant difference in catch rates, but that would be a conclusion in and of itself.

 

I think the most time-consuming step would be digging up the local solunar tables for the event dates/locations and attributing them to the dataset.  And depending on how variable the difference between daily peak and off-peak catch rates ends up being, the current dataset of MLF results may not  yet be large enough to produce a compelling result.

 

As for your offer; this would be a nice project for a stats class but I’m not sure I would commit to being the one to process it all

 

[soflabasser]

Last month I caught another trophy bass to add to my photo album of big bass I have caught. It was caught during a time that the ''experts'' say was not the best time to fish for trophy bass. That is one of the many reasons why I do not pay much attention to people that write books on bass fishing and instead focus my efforts on actual bass fishing since it is what matters most when it comes to catching big bass.