You know it's funny, if you fish from the bank you try to fish as far away as you can and if you fish in a boat to try to fish as close to the bank as you can . LOL :D.
I have spent a lot of days fishing from the bank when I was younger. Sometimes I believe I caught more fish because you didn't have many choices of where to fish. The downside has aways been accessibility to land to fish from.
We use to night fish from the bank also. We would take a long limb and tie a lantern onto the end and run it out over the water with a brace anywhere it was needed to hold to light over the water. Fished with corks and also tight lined. Most of the times we caught fish. Thumbs Up