Exploit those gaps between showers

IT’S TIME to talk about trout. For a start, you can’t beat early-season trout fishing with lean, mean and hungry fish rushing upwards with confidence to take your perfectly placed dry fly before exploding on the surface with raw power. That’s the theory anyway.

It’s all about timing and the delivery of a line in that period, usually very brief at this stage of the year, when flies are hatching. A little cunning skill is obviously useful, and luck is a vital ingredient that I like to enjoy in large measure.

If my first two trips of the season for brownies are any gauge of what delights lie ahead, I’m in for a good year and plenty of fine weather.

First came a good-sized fish on Loch Venachar in the Trossachs: it was duped by a small CDC despite a sunny haze and flat calm. Then last weekend I stole across the field from my house to spend a couple of hours on the Dawyck stretch of the Upper Tweed.

It turned out to be the perfect spring session, short and sweet. The temperature soared, flies were hatching and trout feeding. A kingfisher added colour, swallows dipped and wheeled, and the second cast of a March Brown produced a lovely threequarter-pound trout. A couple of fish were lost, several more were raised, and one of a further two that were landed was kept for the barbecue.

Conditions since have been cold and dreich, and the very notion of rising temperatures, never mind trout, seems a distant dream. And al fresco cooking? No chance.

Such is the month of April, but be sure not to miss out between those squally showers of rain and sleet if a warmer spell arrives, no matter how brief. Now is the best time to enjoy dry-fly fishing at its most intoxicating. Hatches may be short-lived, but during them there is the chance to coax big trout from their otherwise wary lies as at no other time of year.

While waiting for such windows of opportunity, and if still in need of further persuasion to come out from winter hiding places to hit the water, perhaps some light reading will do the trick.

Lesley Crawford has some fine books to her name, including Scotland’s Classic Wild Trout Waters, and is well known too as a photographer, angling guide and an avid supporter of our indigenous species. When it comes to trout she certainly knows what she is talking about, so the title of her latest book, Trout Talk, makes perfect sense. At least it does for those familiar with angling terminology, and for those who are not, it provides an ideal introduction to the jargon.

Her latest contribution will be appreciated by anyone who likes a list, or becomes bamboozled when those around start communicating in a strange lingo. If you don’t know an Agile Darter from a Gadger, Ephemera from Eutrophication, or even your Wulff from your Woolly Worm, then this is the book for you.

It’s an unassuming, light-hearted A-Z of terms, educational and informative, relating to all things trouty. And featuring some truly sumptuous photographs, it does what any book on angling worth its salt should do - makes you want to go fishing.

Trout Talk is published by Swan Hill Press (16.95).

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