Posted By: atx_ben
Solunar Calendar: When to Fish - 10/09/20 02:16 PM
So, a sad story. I get maybe 1-2 weekends a year to hit the salt. Sometimes it has to happen around a family vacation. Sometimes bribery is required. But 1-2 weekends kind of sucks.
The last several years I've been stymied by bad weather and bad fishing. In 2018 I think I got a week long rain/wing storm in Galveston, in 2019 the weekend I got away was way early, and we caught a late cold front that churned up the bay. This year, I was able to get good fishing in during our trip to South Padre, but only for 2ish hours in the morning.
This year I wanted to try something different, and I planned my vacation around the solunar calendar. The claim is that the influences of the sun/moon make all wildlife more active, and fish are no exception. I had always heard old fishermen's tales like "always fish on a full moon", especially about flounder in the fall. I also know I've seen a guide here who uses the solunar calendar to schedule trophy trout trips, and there's a person in the Catfish forum here who uses it (I think) to publish the best times to catch catfish. The October full moon is called "the hunter moon", presumably because this was a good time to hunt thousands of years ago. Cops and emergency room doctors will all tell you about the craziness they see for full moons.
DO any of yall have experience with this? It seems reasonable, given what I know about how the moon drives a lot of human and animal behavior (see examples above). I've always tried to look for changing tides and pressures, I imagine lining those up with the moon phases will pay off.
As a slight epilogue, here's the forecast for Port Aransas on Halloween weekend. The site tides4fishing.com uses tides and the solunar calendar to predict fish activity, and it looks like they're predicting a LOT of fish activity for Halloween weekend in Port A:
![[Linked Image]](https://texasfishingforum.com/forums/pics/userpics/2020/10/full-112354-69255-screen_shot_2020_10_09_at_9.55.41_am.png)
The last several years I've been stymied by bad weather and bad fishing. In 2018 I think I got a week long rain/wing storm in Galveston, in 2019 the weekend I got away was way early, and we caught a late cold front that churned up the bay. This year, I was able to get good fishing in during our trip to South Padre, but only for 2ish hours in the morning.
This year I wanted to try something different, and I planned my vacation around the solunar calendar. The claim is that the influences of the sun/moon make all wildlife more active, and fish are no exception. I had always heard old fishermen's tales like "always fish on a full moon", especially about flounder in the fall. I also know I've seen a guide here who uses the solunar calendar to schedule trophy trout trips, and there's a person in the Catfish forum here who uses it (I think) to publish the best times to catch catfish. The October full moon is called "the hunter moon", presumably because this was a good time to hunt thousands of years ago. Cops and emergency room doctors will all tell you about the craziness they see for full moons.
DO any of yall have experience with this? It seems reasonable, given what I know about how the moon drives a lot of human and animal behavior (see examples above). I've always tried to look for changing tides and pressures, I imagine lining those up with the moon phases will pay off.
As a slight epilogue, here's the forecast for Port Aransas on Halloween weekend. The site tides4fishing.com uses tides and the solunar calendar to predict fish activity, and it looks like they're predicting a LOT of fish activity for Halloween weekend in Port A: