← Back to the blog

Timing

Best Time to Catch Catfish

Right bait, right rig, wrong time — and you'll still go home empty. Here's when catfish actually feed, month by month and hour by hour.

Timing changes more than most people think. The bite windows shift with the season, and knowing which hours to fish — and which months to push hard — is the difference between a few small ones and a session full of big fish.

Time of Day

In summer, it barely matters — catfish feed all day and all night, round the clock. But once you're into the colder months, from around August through September, the bite tightens up into two clear windows:

• 5AM – 9/10AM — early morning, before the sun is properly up
• 6:30PM – 12/1AM — from sunset through the first part of the night

Outside of those windows in winter, activity drops off. In summer you can throw that schedule out — it's genuinely all day round.

Best Months to Fish

Summer is the best overall time to target catfish — they're on tempo, and February and November are two of the strongest months for numbers and for your biggest fish of the year.

October, November and December is spawning season, and that's when catfish get properly aggressive. Activity goes up across the board.

Winter months tell a different story. September is a great month for big catfish specifically — not necessarily lots of fish, but quality. August is more of a grind: you might only land three or four fish in a day, but they tend to be big ones, in the 8–15kg range.

There's no dead month, though. Even in a cold front, with water temperature down around 10 degrees, catfish between 15 and 18kg are still catchable — they're just not as active, so you have to work harder and wait longer for the bite.

Weather That Triggers a Bite

Two conditions consistently switch catfish on:

• Before a cold front — catfish often feed harder in the hours ahead of a front moving in
• Rain — as long as there's no thunder, rain generally pushes more oxygen into the water and gets catfish (and most fish) more active

Worst Time to Fish

Storms with lightning and thunder. The noise pushes catfish — and pretty much every fish in the dam — away from the area. If there's thunder rolling in, it's not worth being out there.

A Mistake Worth Avoiding

Giving up too early. Patience is the whole game when it comes to timing. Some days catfish bite within 10–15 minutes of your line going in. Other days it takes two to three hours before you get anything. That gap doesn't mean you've done something wrong — if your rig and bait are right, it just means you need to give it time.

In a cold front, for example, rods sometimes need to sit in the water for 3–4 hours before that big bite comes — and when it does, it's often the 8–18kg fish. Pack up too soon and you'll never know it was on its way.