CHECK THE WEATHER

WHAT effect will it have on your fishing? In spring we can get sunburn one day and sleet the next. These drastic changes affect how the fish feed, so you need a basic understanding of what’s happening outside to decide how well you’ll catch.

FROST

One frost out of the blue will not do any lasting damage, but four days in a row is bad news. The already low water temperature will drop further and slow things down. This is balanced out a little by longer hours of daylight and more overall warmth.

HOT WEATHER

The same applies here. One warm day can make a few fish swim close to the surface but that’s about it. Several days of warmth will make a difference but I find the first big change in weather from cool to warm always knocks the fishing on the head for a while.

WIND DIRECTION

I’d always want to fish with a ripple on the water rather than a flat calm but wind direction is more important. A cold easterly or northeasterly spells disaster and you need to find a swim out of the wind for the best chance of catching. A warm westerly or southerly is the opposite and if the wind is strong, it can stir the bottom of the lake up and get the fish feeding.

AIR PRESSURE

Big changes in pressure can be good or bad for fishing. High pressure means light winds, clear skies and the chance of a frost and it makes fish come off bottom and often swim close to the surface, where they become very hard to catch. Low pressure, on the other hand, is brilliant, spelling cloud cover and wind and making fish feed strongly on the bottom. If I had a choice, I’d want to fish when the barometer was falling.

RAIN

Despite what some people think, rain is always cold and when you get a few downpours, this cold water sinks to the bottom and pushes the fish into shallow water. So, if we’ve had a bit of rain come down, I’d want to find the shallower parts of a swim or even spend a bit of time fishing off bottom to see how high in the water the fish have moved.