Originally Posted by
DarkSkies
Roddy, maybe I can help clear some of this up.
Some of your impressions may have been true 10-15 years ago.
There were also nights during that time period when some of us could catch double digits of bass, with half being in the mid teen class or higher.
I remember a night I had in one of our back areas where the back meets the front, conditions exactly like you describe, I hit it just right. Had 106 fish, (with about 75% of them being large blues), the rest bass close to legal size or above. That only happened because sardines came into an area, and the fish were feeding heavily on them.
The fishing was so great I went every night after that for the next 7. It didn't even last a week, slowly petering out after a few days.
Still, I was glad that I was able to be there at the right time. Also glad to put a few friends into the fantastic bite as well. Otherwise, no one would have believed me, :) as we were part of a very small group fishing that bite, at that time. (There is a benefit to being careful about how much you put out there on the internet, or in only disclosing the intel, after the bite is long dead.) :learn:
It was a night to remember. I'll have to check my log but I think it was Spring 2010. Every year since then I have religiously fished that time of year hoping for a repeat. That action hasn't happened for me with that degree of robustness, since.
Now, those nights are few and far between.
There was the great jetty bite in the Winter of 2011-12, where you could actually catch 20-50 fish if you fished all night...and there were enough high teen...low 20's...and 30# bass around to make it interesting....but that was IMO a climate and weather aberration that "delayed" many fish from moving on with their usual Southern migration.
Other than that, I don't think many of the newer anglers out there remember the bites of the late 90's, early 2000....when catching 50-100 fish a night, or fishing all night and catching multiple large fish...was more common.