Fishing forecast for Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix runs an inverted fishing year. From June through August the desert reservoirs are too hot to fish through the middle of the day, and the productive hours collapse onto night and the edges of daylight; the season most of the country calls dead — December through February — is when the urban lakes here are stocked with trout.

Best fishing times in Phoenix this week

Majors run an hour either side of the moon crossing the meridian over Phoenix, AZ; minors, half an hour either side of moonrise and moonset. Where those widths come from: best fishing times and how we compute these 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.

Where to fish in Phoenix

This page is built around Lake Pleasant, with Saguaro and urban lakes in reach — fresh water, about 45 minutes from the middle of Phoenix.

Lake Pleasant sits about forty-five minutes northwest of downtown and is the closest big water. Saguaro, on the Salt River chain northeast of town, is the alternative when Pleasant is drawn down.

Night fishing is the practical answer to July, and several of the urban lakes are lit for it. A major period falling between ten at night and four in the morning is worth planning around in midsummer, when the nights stay hot enough to fish through.

Lake Pleasant is fed by a canal from the Colorado as well as by the Agua Fria, and its level swings by tens of vertical feet through the irrigation year. Shoreline access moves with it and marked ramps sometimes end in dry gravel.

Granite Reef Diversion Dam turns nearly the whole Salt River into the Arizona and South canals, which leaves the riverbed through central Phoenix dry gravel except after heavy rain upstream. Tempe Town Lake sits inside that dry bed behind eight hydraulic steel gates that drop to pass a flood and rise again to hold the lake back.

SRP drains sections of the canal system for maintenance each fall and winter on a rotating schedule, closing them for weeks at a time while crews desilt the channel and reline the concrete. A canal bank that fished well one year can be an empty trough the next, which is worth checking before driving to one.

The nearest grids we publish are Las Vegas, NV (412 km, Lake Mead) and San Diego, CA (481 km, Mission Bay). Different water, and different minutes.

What you can catch in Phoenix

State listings put these 6 fish in the water around Phoenix. Plan around the peak, not the open season.

The winter trout in the city park lakes are a put-and-take stocking programme, not a wild population. They are in the water from roughly November to March and gone by the time surface temperatures climb, which is the opposite of the trout calendar in Denver or Boise.

Phoenix does not observe daylight saving time. Local clock times on this page stay on Mountain Standard Time all year, so the sunrise column shifts differently through March and November than it does for Denver, one time zone away in name only.

The rainbow trout and the largemouth bass here never overlap in the same water at the same time of year: one arrives as the other shuts down, and a Phoenix tackle box changes completely twice a year.

The Lower Salt River below Stewart Mountain Dam is stocked with rainbow trout through the cool half of the year, and it is reachable on foot at Water Users, Phon D. Sutton and Granite Reef. The same stretch carries the valley's tubing traffic once the heat arrives, so the quiet water and the stocked water show up together.

Those canals are genuine fishing water — SRP lists trout, sunfish, carp and catfish among the species in them, tilapia have naturalized in places, and white amur were put in deliberately to graze moss and weed off the lining. Access is from the paved maintenance roads alongside, which makes it the flattest bank fishing in the metro.

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

Water temperature and season in Phoenix

Air here swings 39.7 °F across the year, from 55.8 °F in December to 95.5 °F in July. No gauge measures water temperature here, so the chart below is air only.

Monthly climate for Phoenix, AZ. The air line is the NOAA NCEI climate normal for 1991–2020 — the thirty-year average of a calendar month, not the weather of any one year — measured at PHOENIX SKY HARBOR INTL AP, AZ US (USW00023183), 6.6 km from the middle of town, with 27–28 of the thirty years behind each month. No gauge measures water temperature here, so this chart is air only. Water lags air by weeks and the lag grows with depth — a deep reservoir turns later than a shallow bay — so air is never a stand-in for a thermometer in the water. Read into this site on 2026-08-13.

Heat here is not a daytime problem. The air is all that is measured, and its normal midsummer night is warmer than a Seattle summer afternoon; shallow water under that sky gets no overnight reset, so night fishing spares the angler, not the fish. AZGFD writes the limit down: no community-lake stocking between June 25 and September 15. The state's year has a hole cut in it by temperature.

Sunrise, sunset and daylight in Phoenix

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

The longest day of 2026 is June 21, 14h 22m; the shortest, December 21, 9h 56m. The meridian passing drifts about 50 minutes later daily: a dawn window this week is an afternoon window in a fortnight.

Striped bass in Pleasant are landlocked and feed on threadfin shad. When the shad ball up, stripers push them to the surface in short violent boils that can happen at any hour — the one local pattern that genuinely ignores both the sun and the moon.

Flathead catfish here are a summer night fish taken on live bait in the Salt and Verde arms. Channel cats spread across everything including the park lakes, which makes them the one species a Phoenix angler can target within fifteen minutes of downtown.

The National Weather Service dates the Arizona monsoon from June 15 to September 30, and inside that window the afternoon is the part of the day most likely to be taken away from you. Outflow winds and blowing dust build in under an hour, and runoff off the Agua Fria can put color into Pleasant overnight.

Saguaro and Canyon lakes lie in a narrow canyon and the cliffs above them rise hundreds of feet over the water. Direct sun reaches the surface well after the sunrise time on this page and leaves it well before the sunset one, so usable light on those two lakes is shorter than the daylight column suggests.

License and seasons in Arizona

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