Gaulke finds July and August top months for gar fishing. “The best days are hot, clear, and sunny. I mostly sight-fish for them, and these conditions are good for spotting gar, which often are surface-oriented. Gar seem to see lures better in sunlight; momentary cloud cover can noticeably slow down or even turn off a bite.
“They’re generally easy to locate,” he says, “assuming you’re on a waterway that has a good population. In rivers, they’re often found just below dams and around weedy bends and backwaters. In lakes, large weedy flats bordering deep water are good spots, as are mainlake points and isolated weedy bays and creekmouths. If the fish aren’t near deeper water, they’re usually in or near heavy cover. In the late spring and early summer, look for areas that warm up quickly. Power plants that discharge warm water are often gar hotspots,” he says.
Farther south, Terry Smith of Gadsden, Alabama, got hooked on gar fishing years ago and guides for them on the Coosa River chain in Alabama. “When the water temperature reaches the 70°F range in spring, gar feed more actively,” he says. “The action typically starts in late May, heats up in summer, and generally lasts into September, sometimes into October and early November, depending on the year. When water temperatures reach the 80s to low 90s, there’s a lot of surface activity. Some schools are so thick I’d swear I could walk on them—3-, 4-, 5-foot-long fish.”
Like Gaulke, Smith sight-fishes, often looking for surfacing gar. Smith: “Good spots are shoals along the river’s edge and shallow flats that drop into deeper water. When water’s really moving down from the dam, longnose tend to hang on edges of drop-offs where there’s turbulence—spots where they likely feed on concentrating shad during high flows.”
Gaulke searches for fish by using his trolling motor to patrol likely areas, and says that he too finds more fish breaking the surface when water temperatures rise into the 70s. Gar can gulp air to breathe, since their gas bladder is directly connected to their throat, giving them the ability to live in waters with low dissolved oxygen. “They break the surface with an oval- or elliptical-shaped splash,” he says. “Polarized glasses are a must when sight-fishing. They often spook when I’m spotting for them, but they don’t take long to recover.
“While fishing for other species I’ve run across gar and taken a couple of casts at them, and usually I wouldn’t get any response, especially if I cast to a bunch of breaking fish,” he notes. “You wonder whether these fish hit or not. I started to realize that they have intense feeding or activity periods. The bite usually starts slowly in the morning, with few fish showing any interest in chasing a lure. As the sun gets higher, more fish turn on until the feeding reaches a peak, generally holding up for a few hours, after which the bite slows. Peak summer feeding is usually between 1 and 4 p.m. in the waters I fish.
“Since longnose are so surface-oriented you see them when they’re active and inactive,” Gaulke says. “This adds to the notion some people have that they don’t aggressively attack lures. When breaking gar don’t respond to my presentation, I move to another area or fish for something else and return later. When I return, usually I find they’ve settled into feeding mode. They often stay in the same general area for days if not weeks or months, and they tend to use the same areas year after year.”
