The early spring desert wind has been putting quite the damper on the kayak fishing for largemouth bass here in the desert southwest. Non-stop wind day and night. Seldom less than 10 mph and often 20-30 mph has kept the kayaks off the water. It got to the point where we were only fishing a couple times a month, that’s barely fishing at all. We decided that we would try fishing when the wind was most calm, which happened to be between midnight and sunrise.
I’d been fishing for largemouth bass at night before while visiting my uncle in Tennessee. I went fishing with a couple guys using the most basic black plastic worms. I figured “middle of the night and black worms” would result in zero fish and a lot of beer drinking, but the fishing was actually really good and we caught a lot of bass. We decided to give it a try here in the desert and see how it would work.
Even though it was dark, once your eyes got adjusted, it was easy to see by the light of the full moon. Light, reflections and shadows are tricky, you must be extra careful at night. Everything looks different than during the day.
Using Texas rigged plastic worms and fishing in the reeds, the fishing was good. Largemouth bass fishing is exciting during the day, it’s even more exciting at night.
This large bass jumped a few times and headed back into the lakeside reeds but was too big to squeeze between the reed clumps otherwise I probably would have lost it.
As the eastern sky begins to get light, the largemouth bass fishing remains good.
Even before the sun comes up, a number of nice largemouth bass had been caught(and lost). Makes it easy to get up to go fishing in the middle of the night.
Even if the wind comes up early at nine or ten in the morning, we already have a full day of fishing in the books. Night fishing will be in the program from here on.