Fish Per Hour: Why Counting Fish Lies to You (and What to Count Instead)

Ask any surfcaster what their best tide is and they’ll tell you. Ask how they know, and the answer is usually “that’s when I catch the most fish.” And that’s exactly the problem.

The habit trap

Say you fish the incoming tide after work three nights a week because that’s when your schedule lines up with it. Over a season you catch 30 fish on the incoming and 10 on the outgoing. The incoming is obviously better, right?

Not necessarily. If you put in 90 hours on the incoming and 15 on the outgoing, you caught a third of a fish per hour on the incoming and two-thirds of a fish per hour on the outgoing. The outgoing was twice as good. You just almost never fished it.

Total fish rewards whatever you do most. Fish per hour fished rewards what actually works. Every condition you fish out of habit (your usual tide, your usual spot, your favorite plug) will look like the best one if you only count fish.

The proof: the moon that disappeared

This isn’t just a theory. One of the largest studies of fishing and the moon looked at 341,959 angler-reported muskellunge catches over four decades. Counted the usual way, more fish were caught around the full and new moons, which looks like a solid moon effect.

But when the researchers looked at survey data on catch per unit of effort, which is fish per hour fished, there was no moon effect (Vinson & Angradi, PLOS ONE). Anglers simply fished more around the full and new moons, because that’s when they believed the fishing was best. More hours meant more fish, and the belief confirmed itself.

The same thing almost certainly happens with tides, lures and spots in your own fishing.

What to count instead

For any condition you want to judge, whether a tide stage, light period, moon, wind, water temperature, spot or lure, you need two numbers:

1. Fish caught in that condition.
2. Hours fished in that condition, including the hours you caught nothing.

Divide the first by the second. That’s your catch rate, and it’s the only fair way to compare conditions you fish a lot with ones you rarely fish.

Lures work the same way, with one twist: count nights you threw it, not just fish caught on it. The plug you always throw will always have the most fish on it. The question is how often it produces when it’s in the water.

Why skunks are your most important data

This is why serious loggers record skunks as carefully as their best nights. One surfcaster has kept handwritten logs since 1964, across eight volumes, blank nights included (StripersOnline). A skunk is hours with zero fish, and leaving those hours out makes every condition look better than it is, especially the ones you fish most.

What’s a “good” catch rate?

We’re not going to make up a number. There’s no published benchmark for catch rates from the surf, and it varies hugely by species, region, season and whether you’re chasing schoolies or one big fish. A night angler throwing eels for 40-inch stripers and a summer kingfish angler with bloodworms are playing different games.

The useful comparison is you against you: this tide against that one at the same spot, this fall against last fall. Your own average is the baseline, and the conditions that beat it are your patterns.

How many trips before it means anything?

More than a few. Fishing is noisy: one blitz can make a random Tuesday look like the best conditions of the year. A difference based on a handful of hours is mostly luck. As you pile up dozens of hours in each condition, real differences start to stand out from the noise, usually somewhere around a season of honest logging at a spot.

Be suspicious of any pattern built on a few hours, including your own. When there isn’t much evidence yet, the honest assumption is that a condition is about average until proven otherwise.

The bottom line

Counting fish tells you what you did most. Counting fish per hour tells you what works. If you log your trips with start and end times, skunks included, you can compute it for every tide, light, moon and lure you fish, and find out which of your favorite conditions are actually your best.