San Diego & SoCal Fishing Forums

I'd read something about surf perch biting well primarily during low light conditions and have experienced the bite shut down once things get bright on morning sessions. I got curious about the hour of the day that people are observing perch. I downloaded all 460+ barred surf perch records for CA from the website iNaturalist.org (a citizen science platform). I broke down the data into local hour of the report, corrected for PDT vs PST, and plotted the results. All records had verified species ID that included photos. I was surprised at the abundance of records midday. In this data set, there were no reported records between 10 pm (2200) and midnight (2400). I have not looked at tidal phase for these records, which will be a more complex programming task. Thanks for looking. [ edit there are many more people at beaches midday than early in the morning, so there is likely to be an observational bias baked into the data.]

Since you like statistics, you might like https://www.amazon.com/High-Percentage- ... 1517384206 .

Gotfish? wrote: Wed Mar 25, 2026 8:20 am Since you like statistics, you might like https://www.amazon.com/High-Percentage- ... 1517384206 .

Thanks for the recommendation! I bet the book carries lessons beyond freshwater bass!

Thanks for the post and work... I just fish (surf fish) when I can, and it's usually sun-up to about 11:00-1:00... I think that the brightest part of the day, may effect the fishing some, but tidal action effects it much more... We get a lot of over-cast mornings on the So. Cal. beaches so much of my fishing isn't in full sun, so it would be hard for me to say how much the light plays into surf fishing...
Butch

inaturalist folks are generally the type who pay attention to details...like waking up early to fish. Not sure that's the best data source for barred surf perch.
My experience has been that the surf bite is more dependent on tides than time of day. Around high96 tide, when the sand crabs are being washed around, is when I tend to get more fish of all species.
Except when it doesn't work.
My best surf fishing day in terms of numbers was 96 fish; mostly barred surf perch, some walleyes, and some yellowfin croaker, and they bit all day long. That was on a Sunday, at Torrey Pines, north of the river mouth. The day before, with similar tides, I fished for about six hours, south of the river mouth...and was skunked.

Carpkiller wrote: Sat Mar 28, 2026 1:46 pm inaturalist folks are generally the type who pay attention to details...like waking up early to fish. Not sure that's the best data source for barred surf perch.
My experience has been that the surf bite is more dependent on tides than time of day. Around high96 tide, when the sand crabs are being washed around, is when I tend to get more fish of all species.
Except when it doesn't work.
My best surf fishing day in terms of numbers was 96 fish; mostly barred surf perch, some walleyes, and some yellowfin croaker, and they bit all day long. That was on a Sunday, at Torrey Pines, north of the river mouth. The day before, with similar tides, I fished for about six hours, south of the river mouth...and was skunked.

Your back-to-back days extreme difference experience is impressive! That's fishing for ya.