MAPLE VALLEY, Wash. - It doesn’t matter where I’m fishing, anglers always ask me where I like to fish.

My stock answer is I fish in the water. It might sound like a slight but it’s not.

Right off the top of my head I can name at least 83 locations I fish. All of them cover every imaginable kind of water and fishing technique.

Eventually anglers quiz me about times of the day to fish and there’s another funny response that comes with the question. “I fish when fish tell me to”. That’s how simple it is.

To some it’s too simple and difficult a concept at the same time. Once you know how to interpret the best times to hit the water you’ll be leaving your watch at home, as I do, and find yourself fishing at some of the weirdest times of the day and hooking into more fish than ever.

Let’s first consider tides for fishing marine environments.

Tides

Incoming high tides, outgoing low tides, and brief slack tides. These are the tides that anadromous fish use to make their migrations to their natal streams.

There are about four tides every single day only changing by 50 minutes every 24 hours, so if the high tide in the morning was 9 a.m. then the next day it would be 9:50 a.m.

Sounds pretty simple but there are seasoned anglers who cannot figure out that simple thing making it worth mentioning for the rest of us who might find it even harder to understand.

Salmon, cutthroat trout, and steelhead all use currents of tides to migrate; this is especially important to consider “before” fishing seasons open. The best tide to fish is at the beginning of the season on the incoming high tide with an equally low tide as it recedes.

Put them together and there’s usually about 13 feet of water - that’s an amazing amount of water. Migrating fish are helpless to resist it so they simply ride rather than fight it.

To make forward progress on their inland migration they ride the flood, incoming, tide and hold on to the outgoing, ebb, tide. Each subsequent tide brings them closer to their natal estuaries and subsequent rivers and streams. This pattern continues until they make it to estuaries where they begin their process of acquiescing from salt to freshwater environments.

How these tides move, and when, dictate some of the best times to fish.

Wouldn’t you know it? Some of the best times to fish are during the dead of night. Remember, fish and tides don’t know anything about clocks and working schedules.

This is one method of hitting the water when fish tell me to. I want to be there the same time they are and sometimes it means rolling out of bed at two and three o’clock in the morning; that might be the hardest part about fishing the best tides. If you want to catch fish all the time you have to be willing to fish their timetable.

A fast and easy rule of thumb about fishing the best high-high tides is: water volumes between 10 and 13 feet of water transport the most amount of fish at the same time. The best tides to fish as species transition from inland migrations to those just moving into the area are tides ranging from 6 to 9 feet of water. The slower currents allow holding fish to acquiesce to freshwater while incoming fish stay farther out.

Weather patterns that bring any kind of significant precipitation always stimulates holding fish to move inland to natal streams while deeper holding species move closer inland towards estuaries, bays, coves, and inlets.

Click here to find up-to-date tide information from tidal monitoring stations.

Hydrographs

Stable and falling rivers are the some of the best times to be on the water and to do that it’s imperative to monitor hydrographs.

The advent of the Internet has made it easy to find all kinds of information at the push of a button and the click of a mouse; and freshwater levels are critical to streamlining best times to hit rivers and lakes.

How the flow and volume water travels greatly affects how far a fish will travel in a day or how long it will hold before moving upstream. It is the pressures that come with ever fluctuating water levels that put fish on and off the bite.

Technology has inadvertently created a way for intrepid anglers to figure out exactly what kind of pressures fish feel long before getting out to fish.

Rising Water

A historically known fact about fish pressure is they tend to go off the bite during falling barometric pressure. Fish do go off the bite during this time but the little known fact of why is increasing levels of precipitation during low pressure and that means more water introduced to water of streams, lakes, coves, and tributaries.

Increasing volumes of water within the confines of any bank also puts excessive debris in the water, churns sediment, and decreases oxygen levels all at the same time; this is the core of why fish go off the bite during low pressure fronts.

U.S. and Canada hydrographs make it easy to watch up-to-the-minute water levels anytime day or night. Viewing an active hydrograph should be one of the very last things before leaving on a trip. It’s possible for a river and lake to blow out within the span of a few hours. “I know from experience.”

Colored Water

One myth associated with fishing is that rain makes fishing impossible due to coloring up water; veteran anglers call this “stained water”. Anglers will hang up their rods and wait for water to clear up when in fact they should be braving the weather to hook into hordes of fish that crowd shoreline and banks looking to avoid torrential currents.

This is exactly why anglers need to be on the water even as this happens. While it is true that colored water has zero visibility, it’s a fish’s other senses that make fishing so productive during times like this.

Scent and sound put fish on the bite even if they cannot see the offering put in the water. They’ll key in on leaders that have a profile literally put right in front of their noses. There’s a reason for that. While fish are literally blind during colored water, it is that sensory block that keeps them from stressing out, leaving them to focus on their other senses. This is one of the prime reasons to fish colored water. It is yet another way fish are telling anglers to hit the water.

Stable Water

Water that crests during the height of blown out systems that produce stained water become stable. Silt accumulations begin to settle, debris ceases to flow down stream, oxygen levels increase, and holding fish are able to move to larger holding areas and rest before moving up or down stream.

Stable water always puts fish on the bite since there are few natural reasons to stress them out during this time.  It’s possible to anticipate cresting water by monitoring hydrographs and weather reports.

Anglers who time fishing trips this way are likely to find holding fish without competing fishermen. The fewer anglers there are the less fishing pressure there is and that means more bites. This is a prime reason to hit the water, and in most cases, waters that stabilize herald clear weather. Clear weather means falling water.

Falling Water

Falling water levels clear up visibility but not so much that holding fish can see very far beyond the surface. Usually there’s just enough clarity to push fish down to deeper water without putting them off the bite. Anticipate that the water will be green, blue, or brown with one to two feet of visibility.

The great thing about fishing during falling water levels is that though fish go back on the bite, they still cannot see bank or boat fishermen.  Think about this. Suppose that a river is four feet deep, the water clarity has improved by two feet, and that holding fish gravitate at the other two feet. That puts fish near the bottom where anglers can anticipate using leaders no longer than two to three feet, increasing the hook-setting time dramatically.

Anglers will say that this is an obvious time to fish, but it’s “when” a fisherman gets to the water that determines the amount of strikes. It’s important to anticipate falling water so fishermen can be there as it’s happening, not after the fact.

When it comes to anticipating the best time to fish it’s essential to monitor tides, hydrographs, and weather. This is especially true if you intend to fish many times out of the year. Streamlining fishing efforts in this way dramatically increases the amount of fish hookups without the need for excessive looking. Remember, when you’re out on the water looking for fish you’re not fishing. That’s how easy that is.

Weather

Weather puts fish on and off the bite at any given time of the day. This is yet another form of “pressure” that determines how successful anglers will be on any given day. No one can anticipate everything when it comes to weather but with enough basic information, fish bite under almost all circumstances.

Cold Fronts & Fish Physiology

It doesn’t matter where you go or what species of fish you’re after, a falling barometric pressure puts fish off the bite.

Fish are cold-blooded animals that respond to ambient temperatures and a variance of two degrees is enough to stop them from biting anything. Colder temperatures put fish off the bite not by choice, rather, it is a physical response out of their control and some old-timers know it.

Successful fishermen look for waning weather and unstable temperature patterns. Consistent cold weather pushes fish to deeper water, undercuts, or any structure that offers a respite from dropping temperatures.

Only when barometric pressure stabilizes and begins to rise do fish respond.  Rising fluctuations stir them into activity. Their lethargic state and metabolic rate increase with warming trends even if ambient temperatures rise and fall; this is what I mean when I talk about unstable weather.

One really cool trick about fishing during unstable times, with a warming trend, is that there are occasions where the sun will poke through the clouds, making pockets of warm water.

During times of inland migration this is enough to put fish on the bite for as long as the sun is visible. I’ve seen it work many times, so if the fishing ever gets rough and the sun begins to shine pound the water and you’ll likely get fast hookups even as other anglers scratch their heads as fish bite the end of your line.

In the end it all comes down to a small investment of time to figure the best times to fish. No species of fish carries a watch, looks at a clock, or tries to migrate during banker hours. Successful anglers know that sometimes the best time to hit the water is during the end of daylight hours, the middle of the night, or the crack of dawn.

Fishing is relative to what an angler is willing to put into it. To catch fish routinely it’s important to think like a fish and to do that you must forget about conventional thoughts of time; this is the core existence of being a fish. Nature tells them when to move, hold, eat, and propagate. Learn these premises and you will think as fish do and in so doing, know when is the best time to fish and that’s exactly what it means to go angling when fish tell you to.

Timothy Kusherets is the author of Steelhead & Salmon Drift-Fishing Secrets and has numerous articles, tips, videos and fishing techniques on his Top Fishing Secrets Web site.