The Night Bite

For years every so often I have heard success stories about people fishing at night on the Mississippi River backwaters for panfish. Over the years I have tried several times with no success at all. A couple of years ago after hearing another “success” story I decided to try to figure out some way to succeed at night…and besides….. the nature of my job only enables me to fish only at night during the week. I have had some very challenging nights as well as some nights where I had a nice mess of fish. Most fish caught were bluegills with a few crappies. The following is what I have learned these last two years. (About 20 night excursions)

1. If the fish don’t bite well during the day it is probaly going to be even worse at night. THe nights I fished when the day bite was bad were always difficult. In fact, I’m not sure I even caught a fish on nights like those.

2. THe most success I have had has been approximately two to three hours after it gets dark. I have tried fishing the first couple of hours and have had very little success except for the brief flurry as it is turning dark. I’m not sure if it takes the fish awhile to get accustomed to the dark but from my expierience they usually don’t start immediately. Unfortunately I haven’t tried fishing much past 10 or 11:00 so I can’t comment on the later hours.

3. Bait seems to be a requirement. I have tried various lures (lil cecils, rembrandts, ratsos, etc) and without bait have no success …..until this year. A couple of nights ago I caught my first fish on a scented plastic. It seems that smell is important during night fishing. Most of the fish I have caught were with waxies or small chunks of redworms. THe fish were also very slow to take the offering. If you set the hook immediatly most times your jig would come back without the bait. If you wait an extra second or two the hook up ratio was much greater.

4. Lighting… I’ve tried shining a light on my pole and not on the ice. I’ve tried shining light down the hole I’m fishing, neither seemed to be very effective. Most of my success has come from setting a lantern on the ice and drilling holes around it and fish toward the light. I have tried glow jigs and have had success with them but not when they’re at “full glow”. If their really glowing it seems to act as a repellant. Most of my fishing has been shantyless so I don’t have any impressions on lighting in shanties. The few times I have fished in them we have had very little success but that could be the result of the refreshments consumed at that time

THis year I plan on using scented plastics more and to use small tungsten jigs to see up my catch ratio. I’m interested in if any of you have had much success at night and what your techniques were. Please keep replies focused on the Mississippi river. I know about many of the lake night bites.

cool post! thanks for the intel!

If fishing for Crappies, try Tip Downs with minnows. We fish one lake only at night from 2:00 AM until light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrxUjg5zM8s

You do not indicate how deep of water you are fishing and whether you are fishing the deepest or up high in the column. Sunfish and crappies are two completely different birds under the ice and when darkness descends on the ice its a crappie world because their eyes are better suited to dark water than a sunfish’s eyes. You’ll still catch sunnies if you are dropping your jig right into the night quarters down deep but the active crappies will not be down with them. In fact your best night time crappie fishing might be only a foot or two under the bottom of the ice.

Sunfish content themselves with the microscopic bug life that comes up from the bottom at night and feed primarily by scent. Since they do not see that well in the dark, they stay near the bottom since that’s where the food emerges and it helps keep predator fish from zeroing in on them. Crappies are able to see as well as smell and a crappie’s lateral line is much more sensitive and can pick up the sonic vibrations emitted by prey. While crappies will snack on the micro organisms that sunfish feed on, they like larger foods and come well off the bottom to find those foods. If you’re using a flasher look for random blips at mid to upper levels of the water column and focus on the water depth where those blips are being found. These blips can be seen anywhere from a second to maybe four or five seconds depending on how fast the fish is moving or how close to the transducer it is.

IceNutz offers some good advice about the timing for finding active crappies. Crappies tend to lay on the food for about the last hour of twilight in the evening and then rest for several hours. As the water temps get more static under the ice the crappies seem to become more pointed in their food seeking and can show up during the very early hours of the morning and feed hard. Since they can see better than their prey, crappies have an advantage. As the day moves on and sunrise starts to threaten, other fish will become active and start to compete with crappies throughout the water column until darkness threatens again in the afternoon and the other fish sink down deep again.

Shortly after sunset, try fishing your jigs and plastics or jigs and bait two or there feet above the highest fish on the bottom you mark. Crappies will patrol over the sunfish when the sunnies are deep and will eagerly grab a 1″ sunfish as a dinner time chew.

Sure crappies and sunfish can be caught on a line at the same depth during the day, but in dark water this begins to become a bite of one or the other. If you are catching sunfish at night and want crappies, you’ll have to adjust your fishing to where the crappies are using the water at night. If you are seeing crappies on a camera at night down deep on the bottom with the sunfish, those crappies are going to be incredibly hard to coax into hitting and most likely the sunfish or perch will pester the bait before a crappie will show much interest. But even if you see crappies at rest down deep, still look to the mid column water for active fish since they don’t all rest at the same time.

Great read Tom.

Thanks for the info Brian, after yrs of trying I finally cried uncle to the nite slabs on the miss. Frustrating buggers! IMO the gills have never been too active at night on the river. Yrs. of night fishn cat, bullheads etc. only produced an occasional gill even in areas where the gills were active before dark. Keep at it Brian and crack that nut, build a fire and tap that pony keg, I’ll bring the troops

Tom, thanks for the indepth reply. I am only fishing 3 to 4 feet of water. I fish the entire water column but most of my fish have come on the bottom. I never considered that maybe I was to early for the crappies but your post has me thinking that I should try starting at Midnight a couple of times and see what happens. Thanks for the input.

Great read!! I have been trying for a night bite on the Wisconsin River system but it looks like I may not be waiting late enough. Hope this thread keeps building.

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Tom, thanks for the indepth reply. I am only fishing 3 to 4 feet of water. I fish the entire water column but most of my fish have come on the bottom. I never considered that maybe I was to early for the crappies but your post has me thinking that I should try starting at Midnight a couple of times and see what happens. Thanks for the input.

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A couple other thoughts here….

Four feet of water doesn’t allow for much wiggle room. Sound can travel a loooong ways in shallow water like that and just getting to where you want to start fishing or moving to a new spot can scatter fish for quite a ways in all directions.

Does this body of water have deeper water? If this lake is small and is consistently shallow, any deviation in depth could be a gold mine fish-wise. If the lake is larger and has deep water, that’s where I’d be headed. If it a larger lake with deep water I’d also get a paper map of the puddle and spend some time looking for shallow, weedy ares with steep drops to deeper water…underwater points and sunken reefs come to mind.

Great post! I fish the backwaters of the Mighty Miss as well and have often wondered at the night bite but never experienced it myself. I’ve heard good things from certain places but it seems hit or miss. Like birdman said… 3-4 feet is pretty typical backwaters depth… that might be the deepest available depending on the spot. Every area is different of course. From my experience the crappies (day or night) tend to be higher in the water column than the gills but that can vary from spot to spot. I’m interested in hearing some things that others have observed on night fishing the backwaters… totally different animal than lake fishing thats for sure!!

The backwaters are a challenge simply because there are so many dynamics involved in them and while the areas may appear identical those dynamics can make seemingly identical areas very different and the fish are the first to prove it.

Many years ago a friend and I found an area in the backwaters between Wabasha and Nelson, WI that had to be hiked to and offered a rare “night bite”. If we fished the area right at sunset we’d get a mix of fish but as it got darker the crappies came on stronger for about an hour as the sunfish bite went south. When the crappies took a break, we’d move locations by 100 feet and set up on a run of deeper water with current right along a wall of shallower water that had weeds yet. Deep into the night a crappie bite would fire up along those weeds that was often just plain amazing.

We enjoyed that spot between the two of us and never took anyone else along. The next spring during high water that whole wall of weeds and shallow water got erased and we could never find anything quite like it again. Dynamics.

Some backwaters have current, others may be like a dead sea. Sand bottom might be in some areas only to see the usual black mud and detritus bottom so commonly found. That black bottom makes for a tough night bite, but it makes for a wonderful twilight bite when light sensitive worms and other organisms come out of it….notice I said twilight. It happens each evening AND each morning. Another dynamic.

Another dynamic I have mentioned already and that is having shallow and deeper water in close proximity with each other. Having a distinct separation between the two would be my attention getter rather that finding an area with a convoluted, wash-board type of bottom to separate the deep/shallow over a distance.

Don’t forget a couple other things that make a difference too. Moon phase, not so much for the influence exerted on fish by the so-called pull, but rather the amount of night light a full or near-full moon exerts if there is no cloud cover. This “second” light might be enough to keep those light sensitive organisms active all night….which might equate to an all night bite. Also related to the influence of light on the fishing is snow depth and snow cover quality. Deep snow can really darken things under it even when the sun is high and strong. That means the low-light periods can and will occur earlier than they would without snow cover. Adjustments in the angler’s timing have to be considered. Shallower snow that has melted and re-froze a few times gets cloudy and will darken water under the ice too. Like-wise on angler timing.

Time of the year plays into this too. In 4 feet of water, early ice and late ice will shine. Right now isn’t necessarily out of the early ice period, but we’ve had more cold already than recent years and the cold came without much snow. Your fish may have gone to areas more closely associated with mid-winter fishing. Again, finding areas where the shallow meets the deep are serious areas to look at. Your fish will want the deeper water for barometer challenges and daily feeding shifts. During periods of stability those same fish will spend time ON TOP of the shallow water during the day but drop back at night to the deeper water. Crappies are one of the few fish called panfish that seem to enjoy a night-time cruise between the deep water and shallow end looking for a late night dinner and IceNutz knows this probably all too well. lol

Many will tell you that the river and backwaters go dead at night but in reality, crappies are one fish that are well adapted to feeding after the lights go out. Do some homework, do some snooping and you’ll get rewarded. If you do happen into a good area, keep it to yourself, because Mother Nature can erase these places in a blink and other anglers can spoil them even faster.

On the glow jigs….take a matchbook cover and heat the end of a paper clip in a candy and fry a hole smack in the middle of the cover. The burned hole will be clean, moreso than if a hole is simply poked thru. When you want to charge a jig, lay that matchbook over the jig and align the hole to where you want to make the jig glow and snug the two together, then hit it with light. You’ll end up with just a pin prick of glow and that is all that’s needed with panfish in the dark. Most all of the backwaters have stained water and a fully charged jig casts an aura around it because the light it emits bounces off all that stain and micro-particulate junk. The jig will appear ten times larger than it is and will very often just spook fish or make them curious lookers but not hitters. That tiny speck of glow more closely resembles the nature foods found in the water that have some bioluminescence. A little goes a long ways with the glow after the sun sets. What might work with a walleye is simply going to be more than a panfish will deal with. Take time to try the matchbook trick. It works.

Spent the last two nights fishing by the light of my lantern again.

This last week I’ve noticed that the shallow bay that we have been catching lots of crappies and bluegills in has suddenly turned into a tough bite, especially for bluegills. We (my son and I) decided the first night we would fish an adjacent current area for bluegills first and the entrance to the backwater with minnows for crappies later. We had no luck in the bluegill area and set up for crappies at the entrance of the bay. We also whiffed on the crappies although I did manage to catch three gills while my son was hole hopping. WHile leaving the ice I checked out the bluegill spot one more time and was able to ice a nice one.

I think that when you fish at night being quiet is very important. The four fish I caught were when we were seperated and the noise was minimal. I couldn’t help but think we could have caught more fish if we would have been more quiet.

The second night I fished alone and decided to focus on the current area for bluegills. THe water is a little deeper (5 foot). I started with a tungsten jig with a scented plastic. I had several bumps but could not hook up. I decided to add a waxworm to the plastic and the fish cooperated immediately. Usually at night the fish normally bite really light, not this night. In the two an a half years I have been fishing at night this was probaly the most aggressive they have ever been. After two hours of fishing (darn batteries went dead in my lantern) went home with nine for the pan and released the rest.

What I learned! 1.Staying quiet seems to be a must. THe second night I kept noice to a minimum. 2. THe scented plastic/waxworm combo really seemed to trip their trigger. I did try a plain jig with waxworm at one time with limited success. 3. There was a time when I didn’t get a bite with the waxworm/plastic combo for awhile. I checked the waxworm and realized I put a brown dead one on in the night. Seems like fresh wax worms are also important also.

One of these nights I’m going to really try to figure out the crappies. I got an idea where they might be.