I brought up the issue of the moon phase in one of my other posts recently:
http://www.calfishing.com/dcforum/freshreports/684.html
and I thought it was worth revisiting.
For the current moon phases and delta tides, check out
http://www.californiadelta.org/deltatides.htm

One of the beautiful things about the internet is that it allows you to so see fishing results for a given day on many different waters and over many years. In saltwater you can read the fish count in the paper or online every day and get a cross section of the bite from all of California with thousands of fisherman fishing for many different species. Even if I'm not going fishing I'm always checking the fish count in an effort to correlate the fishing to factors like weather, moon, wind, time of year, and water temperature. There are definitely certain condidtions that can lead to good fishing and I believe the moon has a LOT to do with it especially for tuna, white seabass, yellowtail, and other "surface" species. Here is my anecdotal findings for some of the more popular species:

White Seabass: In the week leading to the full moon white seabass are usually on their best bite. We saw this even as recently as last week with the hot bite at Santa Cruz Island. It seems like the best bite is often 3 to 5 days before full, sometimes 2 days before full. Come the day before full, the day of the full moon and the day after, fishing seems to be really tough. This time around was kind of a bad indication because the weekend fell on the best fishing period. I wasn't there but I would hazard a guess that there were TONS of boats out there and that can be an over-riding factor. Today was the day before full and it was tough without being the weekend, so we'll see if I'm full of it tomorrow and the next day.

Yellowtail: I would say that yellows seem to follow similar patterns as the seabass. A big overriding factor with yellows seems to be the weather. As I mentioned on the main page it seems to be generally true that if you have a storm front coming in, the fish will feed heavily during the "lull before the storm" the brief period of good weather that preceeds certain types of storms.

Tuna: I haven't followed tuna super close over time but tuna do seem to bite really well very close to the full moon. Today there were 21 guys for 221 albies out of morro. I've been albacore fishing twice on the day of the full moon though and both trips sucked bad. Of course both trips were "should have been here yesterday" trips, so there's something to be learned from that.

So that's my take on ocean fishing and I feel like freshwwater fish, especially bass, follow similar patterns. This is most evident in the spring when the fish are moved to spawn on the full moon. I believe the best days to fish are 2 to 3 days before full almost irrespective of water temperature. This held true for month after month at Santa Margarita lake. In particular, I caught more big fish in the week to 2 days before full in February at Margarita than any other week long period during the year. I think a few of those bigger fish may actually have been spawning in February despite cold weather, just because they were moon crazy! Maybe I'm moon crazy but I believe it. It sure was tough to get a bite on the full moon day though, and post full moon was always so-so. I'm not talking about all bass here. It's not like I'm saying you will gets skunked on the day of the full moon or have really terrible fishing. What I'm postulating is that I really think that the day of full, the day before and the day after are simply bad times to try to catch big bass. In Margarita that was fish over 5lbs. At other lakes it might be fish over 10lbs. I would love to hear some evidence contradicting this, and certainly there will be some out there, but I just don't think there are that many big fish caught during those three days. Right before? Oh yeah, right during ... it just hasn't happened for me.

What I'm trying to figure out now is, does this apply outside of the spring months? I am starting to think that it does. Yes, there can be over-riding factors. This weekend we had really low humidity and an offshore flow in the bay area, something we barely had all summer. Stuff like that can be an over-riding factor, but in general the bite for big fish should have been good from the 26th through the 30th of September. There were some big fish caught up to the 28th but after that it shut off with the weather.

So no theory is perfect, but I would challenge everyone to follow this deal and let me know what they think. One thing I know for certain. On the right moon phases next year in the spring I will be out getting after the big fish, and I think it will pay off.

So let's hear what you guys think. Am I a barni or what :-)