John Aiden Knight, a US fly-fisherman and outdoorsman, won’t be familiar to many UK sea anglers, but he put together the first modern theories regarding the effects of the moon and sun’s position in relation to each other and the direct influence that had on freshwater and saltwater fish, as well as general animal behaviour. It took him 10 years to fully formulate his ideas and in 1936 he published the first solunar table. Solunar is a word made up of two parts; sol for sun and lunar for the moon.
He wasn’t the first though. The Moaris, indigenous Hawaiians, the Vikings, the native Americans and many other civilisations had predictive calendars linked to the peak solunar times to fish and hunt, these built up over thousands of years.
Today’s most successful big game skippers overseas set great store by the solunar influence when predicting the whereabouts of marlin, tuna and swordfish, noting that the prey species they seek feed differently and in different areas according to the moon and sun positioning. We sea anglers take it for granted that the tides are important to our overall success. Typically, we time our fishing session to coincide with the flood tide and that’s pretty much as far as most of us go. But you can refine things to a much
