Wednesday featured the best fishing of the year ... maybe.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg / The Register-Guard

YESTERDAY was supposed to be the very best fishing day of the entire year.

No, this is not another in a long line of "you shudda been here yesterday" fishing stories. Rather, it's a story about a man who says he knows whether tomorrow will provide you a good chance of landing a lunker.

First, however, there's the matter of yesterday.

With the Earth, the sun and the moon aligned in a virtual straight line, Wednesday is when the cosmos looked down most favorably upon anglers, at least according to those who make fish and wildlife forecasts based on phases of the sun and moon.

Many newspapers around the United States carry a feature called the Solunar Tables - a term derived from "sol" for sun and "lunar" for moon. The tables are based on a 1936 book written by John Alden Knight, who claimed that gravitational fluctuations determine when fish and wildlife are "most active."

A similar feature - Taylor's Astro Tables, which adds electromagnetic fields into its calculations - appears regularly in "Bassmaster Magazine." Taylor's tables rated Wednesday at 96 on a scale of 100, or higher than any other day in 2002.

With deadlines to meet Wednesday, I was unable to test the fishing. But I did have time to chat with Bernie Taylor of Newberg, who says the Solunar Tables are "complete bunk," then argues that the phase of the moon is the most important factor to take into account when planning your next fishing trip.

Taylor is author of "Big Trout: How and Where to Target Trophies," released last week by Lyons Press.

Taylor has made a science out of catching big trout, which he defines as a brown or rainbow of 8 pounds or more, a cutthroat of 5 pounds or better, or a brook trout weighing at least 4 pounds.

Most fishing book authors do their "research" with rod in hand. Taylor supplemented his field experience with "countless hours in the basement of the Oregon State University library" poring over basic research related to fish and their diets.

And his studies led him to conclude that the solar-lunar forecasters were on the right track, but pulled off on a dead-end siding.

It's not gravitational pull or electromagnetic energy that determines the behavior of fish, Taylor says.

It is light, specifically moonlight, that determines the movements of tiny, photosensitive larvae and zooplankton upon which small fish feed. And it's the movements of the smaller prey fish that determine when the big fish feed most actively.

"All animals have active (feeding) and inactive (resting) periods that are timed by their internal clock, which resets itself each day by the natural illumination," Taylor said.

Active periods "are different every day as the intensity and duration of light changes each day over the lunar cycle. An understanding of these changes in light and how the predators react to them will help you to catch the most and largest game fish," he writes.

Prime big-trout feeding periods are at their longest, Taylor said, during the evenings of the second through 10th days following a new moon, and during the mornings of days 18-25 of the lunar cycle. In other words, twilight fishing from Friday through July 19 will be better than it was at any time on Wednesday, the so-called "best day of the year."

Taylor's also says the light-controlled "daily feeding rhythms" dictate what sizes of baits to use, and what types of water to use them in.

During periods that big trout are actively on the hunt, he said, target them with large streamer flies or lures in shallow-water "feeding zones." During periods when feeding conditions are poor - and big trout are likely to be satiated after recent lengthy feeds - your best chances are with small bead-head nymphs fished in deep, cool "resting zones," Taylor said.

"Big Trout: How and Where to Target Trophies" (ISBN No. 1-58574-476-X) is available from book dealers for $24.95 or through Taylor's Web site, www.bigtroutbook.com.

Meanwhile, speaking of big fish, we now have scientific evidence that it takes big fish to make big fish. According to an article in the journal Science, researcher David Conover of Stony Brook University in New York found evidence that harvesting big fish results in future generations made up of small fish.

On the other hand, Conover found that harvesting only small fish and allowing bigger fish to reproduce leads to offspring that are larger and larger in subsequent generations.

The research, conducted using a species called Atlantic silversides, covered four generations. The largest fish were harvested from one group and the smallest from another. From the third group, fish were harvested at random. The remaining fish in each group were allowed to reproduce, and then the process was repeated again and again.

The group from which the smallest fish were consistently removed began to produce bigger fish. The group from which all the largest fish had been taken began to produce smaller offspring. The randomly harvested group produced normal-size silversides.

Conover said his research shows that management plans limiting the catch to only the bigger fish - a common practice for many game fish - actually harms the fishery in the long run.

Mike Stahlberg is the Register-Guard's outdoor writer. He can be reached at [e-mail].