Do Fish Bite at Night?

Some of the best fishing happens at night. Lights on dark water attract small fish, and small fish attract big fish. Often the fish — and the fishing — gets concentrated in the tiny areas where bright lights shine beams into the water.
On June 14 I went to this pier in saltwater along the Kennedy Causeway in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the highway leads from the mainland to the famous Padre Island. The tactic here works exactly the same everywhere, on bays, rivers and lakes from coast to coast: the light shines into the water for an hour or so, the small fish gather, then the bigger fish move in.
Here my nephew and I paid just $2 each to fish on one of several lighted piers along the causeway. We used only small plastic imitation minnows with lead heads, cast through the bright beams in the water. There were bites on every cast, and we caught nine speckled trout (they call these fish "spotted weakfish" in the Northeast) in one hour, along with other non-game fish collectively known in this area as "perch" (none are really in the perch family but it's a word that's often used to refer to the various types of fish that are generally too small to keep). As you see, we sometimes caught two fish at a time when using two lures, and there were scary-looking ribbonfish, with their protruding large barracuda-like teeth.
In Texas you can keep 10 speckled trout per day, but they have to be between 15 and 25 inches long, and none of these were quite that big, so — no keepers, but a good time. (Here, if you catch any trout over 25 inches, you can only keep one per day. If that sounds strict, here are some other limits: any tarpon has to be 7 feet long to be kept, you can only keep one shark per day, and any blue marlin under 11 feet long is too small!)