When a Full Moon hurts, not helps!

[lizardsrule]

Well as some of you already know, the tidal issue is new to me, since moving down to Florida from Indiana. I'm learning as I go . One of the rivers me and my fishing buddy will fish, especially during these hot months, is the Tomoka River, which is very tidal. We usually will have decent luck going way up the river hunting for those bass, the farther you go the less tanic the water is. Well we went out Sunday with our usual ideal for a decent day of bassin. The river area had received some rain the last couple of days, so had a little bit of a rise to it. Coupled with the full moon raising the tide to it's highest level during the month you would think the bass are shallow feeding, wrong LOL. The problem that we ran into is that the higher tides, combined with the rain created the water to be higher than usual, and washed a lot of the debris/crap that usually never gets to the water into it, due to the extra high level. The water that is usually slightly stained, was now muddy. We realized this of course and really concentrated working our baits tight to the cover, with bigger profile baits and water movement baits. We really struggled to catch any fish, let alone bass. There are always tons of mudfish and gar willing to bite along with some bass LOL. We traveled quite a bit all day, only managing to catch 4 bass, 2 of which were keepers. The other 2 were 13". Now we also caught 3 of the 4 fish farther into the tanic water than normal due to the water clearing up. We did fish the muddy water hard, and heavy for the majority of the day, with little success. So the pattern that we expected, and tried didn't work. As a matter of fact the opposite of what we expected was better bassing, more tanic water. Now as we are fishing and trying to figure this out, my buddy said that the last time he fished this river at full moon, he had struggled to catch bass then also. But he exclusively that day hit the higher reaches of the creek. So the only thing I can think of is the full moon is not helping the fishing only hurting it, due to the nature of it being tanic and tidal. We did mange a few mudfish(bowfin for those who don't know) and a flounder(YUM), and my buddy hooked into a nice snook at the very end of the day for us around 6pm, but had it break him off. All of this while bassin LOL. Now again I'm new to this tidal stuff, but these were my observations, and reasoning behind why we had a tougher day than normal. Now any of you that have any other insights of thoughts would be welcome. But I doubt we will be hitting the river during full moon cycles anymore unless we are fishing for food instead of bass. I also believe that muddy water has less oxygen in it due to the mud taking up some of the space in the water, anyone know this for a fact, or at least reasonable knowledge?

Lizards