Fishing forecast for Miami, FL

Miami is the only city in the United States where a tarpon flat, a bonefish flat and a butterfly peacock bass canal sit inside the same city limits, with blue water in sight of the beach. Biscayne Bay is shallow, clear and tropical, and the freshwater canal system behind it holds a South American fish that lives nowhere else in the country.

Best fishing times in Miami this week

Majors run an hour either side of the moon crossing the meridian over Miami, FL; minors, half an hour either side of moonrise and moonset. Where those widths come from: the solunar calendar and best fishing times.

When these windows are not the right tool

Solunar theory is John Alden Knight's 1926 prediction; the ±60 and ±30 minute widths are convention, not calculation. The times are computed astronomy, the claim that fish feed inside them is not. The day rating follows moon phase — identical nationwide, so every city shows it the same. A moving front beats the moon: apps that read pressure.

Tides in Miami

Moving water sets the hour here. NOAA gauge Virginia Key, 5.1 km from the middle of Miami, publishes 37 harmonic constants. Mean range is 2.04 ft, and the form factor — diurnal constituents over semidiurnal — is 0.17, which is semidiurnal water.

Where to fish in Miami

This page is built around Biscayne Bay, with Miami canals in reach — both salt and fresh water, about 10 minutes from the middle of Miami.

Butterfly peacock bass were stocked into the Miami canal system in the 1980s to control non-native forage fish, and the population is limited by cold: a hard winter kills them back. This is the only place in the continental United States where you can catch one.

Tarpon move through Government Cut and the bridges in spring, and the peak is measured in weeks, not months. April through June is the window; outside it, resident fish are present but scattered.

The canals that hold peacock bass are drainage infrastructure, not recreation water, and they run beside roads and behind housing across the whole metro. Access is roadside and bank-only for most of the system.

Biscayne Bay averages roughly six feet deep over oolitic limestone, hardbottom and turtle grass, while the ship channel at Government Cut is kept at fifty feet and deeper so container ships can reach PortMiami. A flat shallow enough to wade and a deep-draft commercial channel sit a few hundred yards apart.

The tide is small — the mean range at the Virginia Key gauge is about two feet — but nearly all exchange between the northern bay and the ocean squeezes through four narrow cuts: Bakers Haulover, Government Cut, Norris Cut and Bear Cut. They run hard on a moving tide, and it is that current, not the height of the water, that stacks up fish.

South of Key Biscayne the bay stops meeting the ocean through cuts. It meets it across the Safety Valve — nine miles of sand shoals split by shallow channels, named for the way they let storm surge back out — so the exchange there is spread over flats, not squeezed through a gap. Stiltsville stands on those banks in three feet of water.

The nearest grids we publish are Tampa, FL (331 km, Tampa Bay) and Charleston, SC (780 km, Charleston Harbor). Different water, and different minutes.

What you can catch in Miami

State listings put these 5 fish in the water around Miami. Plan around the peak, not the open season.

Biscayne Bay is shallow and clear enough to sight-fish, which means the sun angle matters as much as the tide. Overcast days that would extend the bite elsewhere actively hurt a flats fishery that depends on seeing the fish.

This is the flattest seasonal profile in the grid. Daylight swings by under three hours between solstices and the water rarely drops below the low seventies, so the local year is defined by wet and dry seasons rather than by warm and cold.

Bonefish on the Biscayne flats are among the most heavily studied and most declined populations in Florida, and they are catch-and-release by rule. This is a fishery measured in sightings rather than in weight.

The coastal canals are cut by salinity control structures — concrete weirs built to keep seawater out of the drinking-water aquifer — and they divide the fishery as cleanly as they divide the water. Butterfly peacock bass hold above them in fresh water; below them the canal is tidal, and that lower reach is where snook and tarpon are worked.

The offshore calendar runs opposite to the inshore one. Mahi-mahi are a warm-water fish, but sailfish concentrate along this stretch of coast in the cool months, and southeast Florida is the winter mixing zone where Atlantic and Gulf king mackerel stocks overlap. December offshore is not a consolation prize — it is the main event.

Pink shrimp grow up in the bay's seagrass and leave it near the surface on the dark ebb; postlarvae ride in on the night flood. That is why the causeway bridges between MacArthur and Rickenbacker are night water on a falling tide, with tarpon and snook in the light lines.

Tackle sits outside a forecast page: start with how to catch fish.

Water temperature and season in Miami

Air here swings 15.6 °F across the year, from 68.6 °F in January to 84.2 °F in August. Water is measured separately, and it is not the same number: against these air normals the gauge reads 2.7 to 5.1 °F warmer, every month of the year.

The only measured water temperature here comes from the bay gauge, in the open, ocean-flushed part of the system. The canals that hold peacock bass get no such buffering: they are shallow and inland, and FWC puts that fish past its cold limit below 60 degrees — a mark the bay does not reach and a canal in a hard winter does. Same city, two thermometers.

Sunrise, sunset and daylight in Miami

The moon window moves daily; the sun does not. Plan a season against this block.

The longest day of 2026 is June 21, 13h 45m; the shortest, December 21, 10h 32m. The meridian passing drifts 48 minutes later daily: a dawn window this week is an afternoon window in a fortnight.

The Gulf Stream runs within a few miles of the beach here, closer in than anywhere else on the east coast, which puts mahi-mahi, sailfish and kingfish a short run from the inlets — bluewater fishing from a city marina.

The wet season runs roughly May to October and brings afternoon thunderstorms almost daily. In practice that pushes summer fishing onto the morning window regardless of what the solunar table says about the afternoon.

The winter dry months are the most comfortable and the most reliable time on this water, which inverts the pattern almost everywhere else in this grid: the season other cities lose is the season Miami counts on.

This is the southernmost city in the grid and the light behaves accordingly. The sun crosses the horizon at a steep angle, so first light arrives only about twenty-three minutes before sunrise at the equinoxes, against roughly forty-three minutes in Anchorage. The long dawn northern anglers plan around does not happen here.

Miami sits about two and a half degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer, so at the June solstice the noon sun stands within three degrees of vertical, and at the December solstice it still reaches roughly forty-one degrees. That is why the window for seeing fish on the flats stays open through a summer midday and closes in around noon in winter.

Low water at the Virginia Key gauge trails the moon's meridian passage by about two hours, and that lag belongs to the gauge, not to the season — it holds in January as in July. So the major windows above land three to five hours into the ebb here, on falling water, all year.

License and seasons in Florida

Rules for Florida come from the Florida agency, and the calculation behind the table is set out in how we compute these times.