Fishing forecast for Dallas, TX

Dallas is surrounded by reservoirs built for water supply and flood control, not for fishing: Ray Hubbard east of the city, Lewisville to the north, and half a dozen more within an hour. They are shallow, turbid, wind-exposed and heavily used, and the fishery in them is built on stocked and managed populations rather than natural ones.

Best fishing times in Dallas this week

Majors run an hour either side of the moon crossing the meridian over Dallas, TX; 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 Dallas

This page is built around Ray Hubbard, with Lewisville and Trinity in reach — fresh water, about 25 minutes from the middle of Dallas.

Every significant body of water near Dallas is artificial. There are no natural lakes in this part of Texas, and the local fishing calendar is therefore tied to reservoir management as much as to season.

Blue catfish in Ray Hubbard and Lewisville reach large sizes and are targeted on drifted cut shad. Autumn and late spring are the two best windows; the deep summer bite goes nocturnal.

Ray Hubbard is crossed by two interstate causeways, and the riprap along them is the most consistently fished structure in the metro. It is also the only deep hard structure on a lake that is otherwise mud and open water.

Ray Hubbard impounds the East Fork of the Trinity below Lavon, Lewisville the Elm Fork below Ray Roberts: both metro lakes sit mid-chain, and a release from the dam upstream reaches them within hours. The upper end of Ray Hubbard, above the Interstate 30 crossing, still carries standing timber that the open main body lacks.

White Rock Lake is inside the city itself: roughly 1,090 acres, twenty feet at the deepest, a public trail all the way round, piers and stands of bulrush and water willow on the bank. Outboards are capped under ten horsepower, so it stays a bank and trolling-motor fishery, and the city has dredged it four times since the 1930s.

The nearest grids we publish are Houston, TX (362 km, Galveston Bay) and Corpus Christi, TX (557 km, Corpus Christi Bay). Different water, and different minutes.

What you can catch in Dallas

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

The white bass run up the tributaries — the Elm Fork, the Trinity arms — in March is the earliest reliable fishing of the year here, weeks before the bass spawn.

Texas summers are long and severe. From late June through August the surface water gets hot enough that the productive window collapses to the first two hours of light and the last hour of it.

The hybrid striped bass here cannot reproduce and exist entirely because the state puts them in. Their year classes are therefore known quantities, which is unusual for a fishery of this size.

The Trinity below the city is alligator gar water — state biologists have estimated some 1,400 fish of 78 inches or better between Dallas and Lake Livingston. They take twenty to thirty years to reach six feet and can live past fifty, and they spawn only when a late-spring rise floods vegetated bottomland.

Threadfin shad are the forage base in Ray Hubbard and Lewisville, and they do not tolerate cold: below about 45 degrees they begin to die, and a hard North Texas cold snap puts dying shad on the surface. Hybrids, white bass and blue catfish feed underneath, and working gulls are the most reliable winter marker on either lake.

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

Water temperature and season in Dallas

Air here swings 39.5 °F across the year, from 47.8 °F in January to 87.3 °F in July. Water is measured separately, and it is not the same number: against these air normals the gauge reads 9.9 °F warmer in December and 1.8 °F colder in June.

Monthly climate for Dallas, TX. 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 DALLAS LOVE FLD, TX US (USW00013960), 9.5 km from the middle of town, with 28–29 of the thirty years behind each month. The water line is neither a normal nor the air: daily means at USGS gauge Trinity Rv at Dallas, TX (08057000), 2.1 km out, averaged by calendar month over 2015–2025 — 7–9 complete years per month. It is the surface at the gauge, not the water on any particular spot, and it lags the air by weeks, so the two lines are not interchangeable. Read into this site on 2026-09-22.

TPWD puts the bass spawn at water near sixty degrees — February in south Texas, spring this far north. Only air is measured here, and it crosses that band twice a year, the water some weeks behind. The two crossings are not the same length: autumn falls through it faster than spring climbs through it, so the fall window on these reservoirs is the shorter of the two.

Sunrise, sunset and daylight in Dallas

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

The longest day of 2026 is June 21, 14h 19m; the shortest, December 21, 10h 00m. The meridian passing drifts about 50 minutes later daily: a dawn window this week is an afternoon window in a fortnight.

Hybrid striped bass are stocked into several of these lakes and behave like the wipers in Kansas: they roam open water after shad rather than holding structure, and finding bait is the whole game.

These reservoirs are drawn down in drought years, sometimes dramatically, and boat ramps close as a result. Water level rather than season is what most often determines where local anglers actually go.

North Texas takes its rain in two short seasons, spring and autumn, and almost none in between, so the reservoirs draw down through the summer and refill in a few weeks of storms. A lake coming up over dry brush floods new cover and the bass move onto it within days; a lake dropping through the same brush strands them off it.

The sun peaks near half past one on summer clocks here, better than 80 degrees above the horizon, and falls under 34 degrees at the December solstice. The difference shows as shade on stained water: in June the open flats have none and the causeway bridges and boat docks hold what there is, while in winter the same structures throw a shadow line all day.

None of this water makes fishable ice, and the December day still runs just under ten hours against a little over fourteen at midsummer. Where the northern lakes in this grid shut down for months, a North Texas winter is simply the season when crappie stack on deep brush and the surface is never too warm.

License and seasons in Texas

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