Featured Stories

Baits that light up the night do more than just look spooky. Learn to increase your catch rates with glow-in-the-dark or illuminated lures.

Glow baits are cool. Simple as that.  And when they light the night, there’s an undeniably spooky quality that goes with October.

Novel appeal only goes so far with fishing lures, though. Functionality is far more important. Thankfully, lures that hold a glow or are otherwise illuminated offer practical benefit. Namely, when used in the right situations, they help you catch more fish.

Glow offerings come in a broad range of sizes and in baits designed to work all parts of the water column and for many kinds of fish. Popular applications include night-fishing, ice fishing and working dirty water, but opportunities don’t end there.

Beyond helping you beat the heat and the crowds, summer night crappie fishing provides dependable action. Here’s what you need to know.

Seeing a few minnows in a pier light, you know it won’t be long. Soon more plentiful minnows will become part of the scene, and the dark shadows of crappie will start showing up. If all goes according to plan, the crappie catching action will soon kick into gear.

Night fishing for crappie has definite advantages through mid-summer. Two obvious advantages are an escape from the heat of the day and the chance to avoid crowds of pleasure boaters and other anglers. Fishing is about trying to catch fish, though, and the most important advantages of summer night crappie fishing are that fish tend to be congregated and cooperative, and the patterns are predictable.

Crappie are active at night, moving shallower than at other times and actively seeking food. They feed opportunistically on concentrations of forage, which is central why summer night fishing tends to be predictable.

You read that title correctly. The BOOYAH Covert Series spinnerbait has some new options for when things go “dark.” The new Night Time Series Covert has been added to the line for night fishing or when water gets extremely muddy.

When asking Jason Christie why this addition had to be made to the line, he jokingly said, “to fish at night…”, but after some laughs, he gave me some real knowledge of why this lure had to join the ranks with the other highly successful Covert series models.

Better from the bank?

Many areas provide quality fishing access to anglers who don’t own boats. Often, though, these seem like bonuses, where shoreline anglers “also” can enjoy fine opportunities. The fall walleye night bite contrasts this notion. In many places bank fishing or is substantially better than boat fishing and provides outstanding big-fish opportunities.

On autumn nights walleyes push surprisingly shallow to feed. Moving tight to the shore in many lakes and onto bars at the heads of holes in river, they get in spots that would be difficult to work effectively from most boats and where navigation could be treacherous after hours. Anglers who work from the shore, or occasionally by shallow wading, but still on foot, can fish key zones very thoroughly.