Fishing at night

Todd Copeland wrote:

Now that I have a boat with a livewell, I'm looking into entering a simple
tournament. Just to put this into perspective, I'm not looking to win, I
just want to give it a try for the fun of it. I live in Florida and I've
noticed that many of the tourney's are at night (6pm-9pm or 9pm-2am). I've
fished until dusk before and then stopped as it just becomes difficult to
fish when you cannot see anything. I'm wondering how people fish at night.
Do you use spot lights to see the shore, tree limbs, surface vegetation,
etc? Do people usually fish off shore for the most part? Any insight you can
gie would be great!


I fish a lot at night and one of my clubs has a couple of night
tournaments - the first a week from Saturday.

I hate spotlights at night. There have been many times when I was
catching bass and some idiot shined a spotlight on me and the bass quit.
I like a rocky point or bank at night and fish a black plastic worm,
black spinnerbait or crankbait with rattles.

If you will keep your running lights on but keep spotlights turned off,
you will be able to see where you are going on most nights. Starlight,
dock lights and moonlight will outline the bank and if you go slow you
won't have problems. Turning on a spotlight blinds you to everything
except what is right in the beam, so you can run up on problems fast.

Bass act at night much like they do during the day. Fish the same places
the same way. Although I like black, I have been beat many times out
of the back of my boat by folks using different colors. Deep structure
holds bass at night, too. I won a club tournament last summer on a rocky
ridge on the main lake fishing Mag 2 worms Texas and Carolina rigged in
to 15 feet of water - had a limit of small keepers.