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.

Twilight is a period of peak activity. Fish move to the edge of woodcover or weeds to attack passing baitfish, and they form aggregations that move along cover edges to flush prey. During summer nights, active largemouth bass prowl areas they rarely visit in daylight. They're less cover oriented and often roam sparsely weeded flats in the 4- to 8-foot range. Less active bass remain in cover. Lighted docks simulate daylight by creating shade where bass might lurk all night, feeding when an opportunity arises. At dawn, they return to edges to feed, shifting into thick cover as the sun rises.