Fishing forecast for Memphis, TN

Memphis fishes the lower Mississippi, which drains 932,800 square miles above the USGS gauge at Memphis. Below St. Louis the river has no locks or dams, so there are no navigation pools to fish here: the fishery is the open river, with its main channel, channel borders and wing dikes, plus the backwaters and oxbow lakes the river has left behind.

Best fishing times in Memphis this week

Majors run an hour either side of the moon crossing the meridian over Memphis, TN; 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 Memphis

This page is built around Mississippi, with McKellar Lake and Horseshoe in reach — fresh water, about 15 minutes from the middle of Memphis.

The lower Mississippi at Memphis is a genuinely large river — wide, deep, fast and carrying heavy sediment. Fishing it means fishing the edges: dike fields, revetment, and the mouths of tributaries where the current slows.

Blue and flathead catfish lead the species list. MDC's advice for Missouri's big rivers puts blue catfish in the swift current of the main channel and along its borders, flatheads in deep water off the ends of wing dikes, and both around scour holes and rocked banks on the outside of bends.

The river past Memphis runs without dams, but not without control. The Corps of Engineers' Memphis District armors the banks with articulated concrete mattress and stone paving to hold the navigation channel's depth and alignment, and says that without the work the river would shift into new, shallow cutoffs that boats could not safely use.

The nearest grids we publish are Nashville, TN (316 km, J. Percy Priest) and St. Louis, MO (387 km, Mississippi & Missouri confluence). Different water, and different minutes.

What you can catch in Memphis

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

Horseshoe Lake in Crittenden County, Arkansas, is a Mississippi River oxbow, a former bend of the river ringed by private land. Arkansas Game and Fish says nearly half of the anglers there target crappie, with bass anglers a close second and bream and catfish also popular.

McKellar Lake is a harbor off the main channel inside the city, giving still-water access without a long run. It is the practical local option when the river itself is too high or too fast.

Crappie move with the seasons on a big river. In MDC's account of Missouri's big rivers, late winter and early spring find them near deep structure along tributaries and backwaters, and as the hot months approach they move to cooler water and rock structure along the main channel border.

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

Water temperature and season in Memphis

Air here swings 40.7 °F across the year, from 42.1 °F in January to 82.8 °F in July. No gauge measures water temperature here, so the chart below is air only.

Monthly climate for Memphis, TN. 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 MEMPHIS INTL AP, TN US (USW00013893), 11.9 km from the middle of town, with 30–30 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 2026-09-14.

Even the normal January low at the airport stays above freezing, at 33.3 degrees, so no month in this table has a freezing night on average. Rain is the uneven column: April is the wettest month at 5.87 inches, September the driest at 3.03. That gap matters more to a shallow oxbow than to the channel, whose stage is set across the whole basin rather than by weather over town. None of these numbers is the water.

Sunrise, sunset and daylight in Memphis

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

The longest day of 2026 is June 21, 14h 32m; the shortest, December 21, 9h 47m. The meridian passing drifts about 50 minutes later daily: a dawn window this week is an afternoon window in a fortnight.

River stage swings enormously through the year and is driven by rainfall as far away as Montana and Pennsylvania. A stage forecast is more useful here than a weather forecast.

Spring flooding is normal rather than exceptional, and high water in April and May can put the main-channel fishery out of reach for weeks while the backwaters fish well.

The National Weather Service gauge on the Mississippi at Memphis puts flood stage at 34 feet and major flooding at 46, when Riverside Drive at Beale Street goes under and Tom Lee Park begins to flood. The record crest is 48.7 feet, on February 10, 1937. The river also falls below the gauge's zero: the official record low is minus 10.7 feet, in July 1988, and a preliminary reading of minus 12.06 feet came in October 2023.

License and seasons in Tennessee

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