Okanagan Lake fishing times

What the windows mean

A major is the three hours centred on the moon passing directly overhead, and again when it is directly underfoot on the far side of the earth. A minor is the two hours around moonrise and moonset. Solunar theory holds that fish feed harder in those periods, and that the effect is strongest around a new or full moon when the sun and moon are pulling together.

Every fishing app you have used is showing you some version of this. What most of them will not tell you is how much weight to put on it.

What we actually think of it

It is a tradition, not a law. The published evidence is mixed, and anyone selling you a guaranteed bite window is selling you something. Geoff has fished this lake for forty years, and in his order of operations solunar sits well behind wind, water temperature and where the kokanee have moved.

Where it earns its keep is choosing between two otherwise equal mornings. If you can fish Tuesday or Thursday and everything else looks the same, take the one with a major in daylight. That is a sensible use of it. Deciding whether to come at all based on a moon phase is not.

How these times are worked out

We compute the moon's position for 49.8164, -119.6229 — the dock on Gellatly Road, not a nearby town — and find the exact moments it culminates overhead and underfoot, plus moonrise and moonset. Those culminations are located by hour angle rather than by peak altitude, because when the moon's declination is shifting the two are not the same instant. Getting that wrong put our underfoot window nine minutes out before we corrected it.

The output was checked against a published solunar app for this exact location and every value agreed within three minutes.

The day rating, and why ours differs from your app

The percentage is our own, and we will show the working rather than hand you a black box: up to 60 points for how close the moon is to new or full, and up to 40 for how much of that major and minor time actually lands between sunrise and sunset, when you would realistically be out. A day with both majors in the dark scores badly even under a full moon, because you cannot fish it.

Other apps weight it differently and will give you a different number for the same day. Neither is authoritative.