While the world swelters in midsummer heat, a cult of night fishermen wait for darkness. The reward is a world many will never know, a world of dripping yellow moonlight and awesome blackness, of quiet conversation and sudden excitement, of blind battles with bruiser bass.

Job schedules, avoidance of crowds, and fascination with the night world have kept me night fishing for bass since my earliest fishing seasons. But participation in night tournaments changed my approach to nocturnal angling from a pleasant pastime to a scientific pursuit.

Few anglers normally find fishing through an entire night enjoyable or feasible. It takes a rigorous tournament timetable to make an angler forsake sleep and concentrate on maximizing his catch through a complete dusk through dawn cycle. Those all-nighters have revealed, however, that during summer nights, four distinct activity periods often occur.

The Twilight Bite

The first is the dusk bite, a widely recognized summer phenomenon that also occurs during the other three seasons. Bass use a sight advantage over prey species to feed. Top presentations have multiple sensory cues -- noisy, slow-moving topwaters like the Jitterbug or Spin-l-Diddee, or buzzbaits; chartreuse spinnerbaits in murkier conditions, or bulky worms and lizards rigged with rattles. In clear waters, twitching a minnowbait is hard to beat.

The dusk feeding binge ends when twilight turns pitch black. Feeding by predators is minimal because the adjustment from day vision to night vision (called accommodation) requires at least half an hour. Within the retina of a bass' eye, cone cells that provide color vision in daylight are replaced by light-sensitive rods that must be protected from the sun during the day.

Midnight Munchies

A second feeding peak usually occurs within several hours after full darkness. Look for moonrise and moonset to be peak activity periods related to solunar factors as well as changes in light level. By this time, bass have moved away from thick wood or weed cover and tend to roam over open flats, hunting prey. Try shallow humps, points, islands, and shoreline areas. Swimming beaches also are hot spots.

In addition to topwaters, big-bladed spinnerbaits are key tools as bass tend to feed upward. Colorado and Indiana blades thump strongly, producing attractive underwater vibrations. Lighted boat docks also draw insects, baitfish, and bass in the middle of the night. Fish the shadow edges as if they were shady spots in daylight, casting tubes, small worms, and plastic sticks like the Senko or Berkley Jerk Shad.