The golden hour problem

The above post took me better part of two hours to post…some of which was covered already.

As I remember the fish tracking studies, the fish had multiple haunts. Not just two but four or five places they would hang out. And most of their activity was moving from haunt to haunt. Every so many hours they would move from one to another and camp out there for a while. I can’t remember the duration, but I thought it was multiple spots in a day. And so I remember the huge lengthy reports….

So in application what would that mean? Wouldn’t it mean a 20 minute window of travel(for the fish not you) from one spot to the next and then possibly hours of wait for the next travel time?

I was also under the impression that big numbers of fish were a seasonal thing? Smarten me up.

I’ve never heard of flatheads having multiple “haunts” within a day. Do you have the study that this comes from? What I remember is seeing that they show a lot of site fidelity, even from year to year, and that they’re coming out and going back, suggesting hunting forays.

Not sure what you mean by “big numbers of fish” being a seasonal thing. They’re out there all year long, but only very concentrated around wintering holes from fall through early spring. But some habitats naturally support bigger populations than others, so supersnags, or superstructure may hold “big numbers” (relatively) in the prespawn as well. I think you can also come across big numbers by finding travel corridors during the right time in the spring.

In this article they mention multiple haunts.

Web Post Here<<<

Within an ongoing round-the-clock radiotracking project, a subset of adult flathead catfish Pylodictis olivaris (n = 6) was continuously radio-tracked for 24 h to determine detailed diel movement path characteristics and activity in two Missouri streams. The ongoing radiotracking revealed that only a small percentage of point-in-time relocations were recorded as moving, while the majority (greater than 90% for every hour of the day) found fish stationary. The continuously-tracked subset of catfish generally moved by making discrete directed movements from one location to another, with locations corresponding to a physical habitat feature (large woody debris, clay point, undercut bank). All fish revisited locations during the 24-h tracking efforts. Movements were less than 100 m during early afternoon and the first 2 h after sunset, with longer movements undertaken from 2100 through the night to the 0500 hour, ceasing at sunrise. Movement paths had a median distance of 641.16 m with a median activity radius of 66.55 m. Fish spent a median 23.33 h stationary and 0.67 h moving during the diel cycle. The continuous tracking effort resulted in finer resolution and detail than was evident in the larger, typical point-in-time tracking dataset which did not highlight an early afternoon activity period, perhaps due to short, quick movements made at that time

There was another study I originally found a link to it here but it was really long and not summarized so well. But pertaining to the original subject, I was thinking if the fish move and sit and move and sit so maybe you would have to wait out the sitting cycle to get the big numbers unless you do find that supersnag.

Interesting… I found this after I posted the last one too – I have a copy of it and either read it and forgot it, or never read it. I think the most interesting part is that the post-spawn cats (the study was July 15 – Oct.) move about 40 minutes a day total. That explains my lean late summers.

What I think it means for fishing is that you have to run and gun and fish tight to cover because the odds of finding moving fish drop in post-spawn. Makes sense to me. I’ll go through my own records to check if I’ve had any “big number” nights in late July/August. I’m thinking the number of such nights will be small, even in my better years.

I also think this means that big cats can’t dominate structure in post-spawn – they move out and probably rotate through spots with smaller ones filling in behind them.

I’m going to go through this study and read it in detail – it’s done on a smaller river, and that could have a big effect. Some of the daily movements could be shade related, with cats moving from hole to hole as the sun’s direction changes – may not play out that way on the Miss.