Fishing Into The Evening

[cassidyta]

My club only fishes Jan-Oct so next week is the last club event of the season.
Throughout the season, my tournaments have ended at 2:00 each day. For the last event, the tourney goes from sunrise until sunset. Being that I almost never fish the late afternoon and evenings in the lakes. Do you fish it the same as early mornings? If not, how do you do it differently. I suspect that it might be a little tougher since the fish have heavily pressured for most of the day.

[Bender]

That stinks that is stops at sunset, that's when they seem to move shallow and start biting. From my experience the fishing stays about the same in the afternoon but once the sun starts to go down they do start moving more shallow. Last evening they were chasing bait fish right up on shore, I thought some of them had beached themselves. I they jigs and cranks at them. Only thing I could get them to bite well was a wacky rig tossed about 5' off the bank and let it soak for a while.

[cassidyta]

Unfortunately all of my "lakes" are actually city owned reservoirs. So we have to be off the water before dark. I will probably have to weigh in by 6:00 pm.

[keithdog]

I pretty much use whatever pattern has worked throughout the day but if the water is starting to calm down I start tossing a topwater again. I usually don't toss a topwater durring mid day unless the bass tell me otherwise.

[bamabassman]

I use the same as in the morning, but somtimes I will use a different COLOR of the same lure as the morning. Meaning, instead of a white spiner, go to a darker color. Instead of a punkinseed lizzard, junebug, and so on and so forth. Hope I helped you.

[carolina-rig-01]

It sounds like everyone has given you some sound advice on this subject. But I would like to add one thing. Take care of your fish. This is a long time for fish to be in a livewell, especially if they are caught early in the morning. I have no idea what your water temps are out there but take extra care to regulate the temperature of the livewell water, change water several times through out the day, add some thing like Rejuvinade or Catch and Release, and the right amount of peroxide will keep an abundance of O2 in the water for the fish.

Probably nothing you didn't already think of but I just wanted to make sure, good luck.

[IowaBasser]

A lot of times this late in the fall I've noticed the top-water bite (a frog for me this fall) doesn't really pick-up until an hour or more after sunrise when the water starts to warm up. The top-water bite lasts until late morning; usually just before noon when the sun is high - then I switch to spinnerbaits, flukes or plastic worms. One of those (spinnerbaits, flukes or plastic worms) usually works all afternoon. I don't fish enough with jigs and crankbaits to offer good advice on those.

Of course this all depends on the temp, wind, and cloud cover. The nights are getting pretty cool here now in Iowa: upper 30's / low 40's. Things are probably drastically different in San Diego, CA!

[cassidyta]

C-Rig-I always keep rejuvenate in the boat. That stuff works wonders. While the vent is all day, we do a midday weigh in where we weigh each fish individually. That way we can release and they are never in the livewell more than 6 hours.

Iowa- Our temps are a little warmer out this way. It is dropping down to 62 at night. Water temps are still around 72 in the upper column