I thought the kingis may feed harder with a bigger moon through the night and less during the morning of the next day,due to bait being easier to find??? I might be waaaay of track but If I thought about other animals,wild pigs for instance, I find they sleep in the next day and are harder to get onto in the morning cause they dont move around as early as normal.
I beleive the tides have to play a big part in finding kingfish,bait move with tides and currents,thermoclines etc..what does Doris think? maybe the archives reveal some sort of pattern?Full moon fishing goes off - great time to get mega reds.... Mokes espeically fishes well on a full moon. But can be hard work in the days prior too and directly after.
But who cares, I'd rather not know because if you have planned a trip your not going to pull the pin because the moon is sitting right. If i'm going out I'd rather not know
I’ve only been interested in this aspect of fishing for a few months but in that short time I have noticed an increase in activity for the time of day but as yet have I do not hold an opinion on the variables days for the month. I use several programs each one mostly as a source to verify that the dates and times are correct. I do not fish in the sea but fish estuarine water for searun trout and the mouth of salmon rivers where tidal flow is important factors. For straight tides I use Ocean Fun, but another that not only gives the tides but best fishing times is one called Wtide.
http://www.mdr.co.nz/wtides/downloads.htm Of the two I prefer Wtide as it not only gives the tide flow but the best fishing times for the day moon phases, time from both high and to low water. It’s not complicated but the graph can take a little time to work out. The best way is to change the colour to suit yourself. The only down side is that the program has preset long and lat but if you click on the world map zoom in to your local harbour etc you should get a close time. I fish the Waimak mouth but the close tide harmonic is Lyttleton. It’s a freebee but you can pay to be a registered user and this gives you further options
I also use http://www.solunarforecast.com/worldcalendar.aspx Another freebee but you need to register to use the World solunar prediction table. This is Lat and long specific. You can zoom into the desired location on the map and click the long and lat. for that area.to get the best times so if you know your GPS co-ordinates you can get the best times exactly for that area. The solunarforcast time zone only goes to UTC +12. This is not NZDS which is UTC +13 so you will need to add one hour onto the time until our daylight saving ends and we go back to UTC +12.
Sol/forecast is a text based table that gives the best times for all days of the month and can be printed using the PDF icon.
Another program I use is Skyviewcafe http://www.skyviewcafe.com/ This is an online planetarium. It has a number of features one of which is the transit times of both the sun and moon. Without going into much detail there are two schools of thought with solunar tables. One school believes the rising and setting of the moon is the fundamental factor of ‘bite times and the other the transit times or when both the sun or the moon are at the highest point in the sky. I have only delved into this in a small way but it seems to me that most solunar tables are based on transit time but some appear to be based on moonrise and moonset. While it is true that feeding activity can be observed during this time I think other factors in low light come into play like light polarization and UV factors for target acquisition but this is another subject and not one for this thread and not point of my post. I hold that the transition of both the sun and the moon and when these are in line as they are on the 28 Dec at 1.30pm good fishing should be happening.
Skyview as with the solunarforcst is a lat and long specific program so once again if you know the exact lat and long for your area you can put these in and get the transit time for the exact area that you are fishing in.
Using these programs you can check the accuracy of times with either sunrise of sunset times from your local paper. You may get a variance of a few minutes.
For the die hard on this I sometime use this http://www.jgiesen.de/moondistance/index.htm It gives the moon distance which many maintain it is the distance of the moon that determines the dates of the month are the better than others when the moon is futher away. Light and gravitational factors may have something to do with this so if the weather is not good and you have nothing better to do have a play around.
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