All right, here we go: an article giving away one of our best kept secrets on outdoor fishing adventures.
Fishing and
adventure? In the same sentence? Yes, we answer…but we agree you have to love it to truly understand the unmatchable thrill of casting a line into the sea. It’s like surfing; you either get it or you don’t.
Anyway, here’s the deal: how do you pick the best time to go fishing? You can time everything around the hours of your local pub, which assures that at the very least you’ll catch the happy hour; or you can look up the tide tables.
You see, it’s the tides that rule the fish. Most people know that low tide is the best time to go fishing. Little fish are being sucked out to deeper water where the bigger fish are waiting for easy meals.
But not all low tides are the same. Ideally, you want one that has a strong flow, and coincides with the early dawn. Here is how you find those tides. I’ll use a San Diego reference as my example, since this is where I fish. Go to
Peter Brueggeman's site. At this site, Peter Brueggeman, who is the Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library University of California, San Diego, developed a graphical tide predictor. This was the first one ever put on the web.
Look at the chart and click on “Tomorrow.” The chart will advance by one day. Click again, again, again, and again. See how the tidal flow is represented?
Pretty cool, eh?
What you are looking for are high, steep drops that coincide with dawn, more or less. In other words, you want to find a morning where the sun is just coming up and the tide is a strong outgoing tide.
Here is a good example below:
Here is a bad example below:
For this coming summer, you can plan ahead and scope out some good days to get out on the jetty and fish. Although, actually, any day is a good day to fish, if you know what I mean.
Now, I usually fish off ocean jetties, so that’s what I’m talking about here in this article. It’s not that I can’t fish fresh water, because I can and I’m actually pretty good at it. Too good, in fact.
I’m no longer allowed at any of the San Diego lakes. I was banned after an unfortunate incident, which was none of my fault. What happened was that I was fishing from shore when I hooked into a good-sized bass. I fought it for 45 minutes and when I finally reeled it in, the fish was so big the water level of the lake dropped by several feet. This left all the fishermen in their boats high and dry, screaming at me and calling me names. The Rangers came and banned me. They made me throw the fish back in to refloat all the boaters, so I don’t have a picture.
But it’s all true.
