Few bites in a chilly April

Anglers on the Clyde expect a period when the river is in the doldrums, which usually occurs in February – but this year it happened last month.

April is supposed to be a month of showers, but nobody expected them to be hail or snow.

Even on a cool day, anglers expect to see mayflies and stoneflies on or above the water, and the occasional trout coming to the surface to take them.

However, due to the cold, few anglers ventured out to try their luck, and those who did often regretted it. The wind frequently made matters even worse.

In the upper and middle reaches of the Clyde, the absence of surfacefeeding fish prompted several anglers to resort to the use of nymphs.

The question an angler would often consider was about which of the two possible species of mayfly was emerging – or at least the most likely to be ready to break through the surface to appear as duns.

This was regarded as unimportant when an angler suspended two or even three gold-headed nymphs under a floating fly.

The gold head gives the impression of being mature insects ready to break through the surface.

A maturing nymph will hyperventilate and pump excess oxygen into the space between its final aquatic skin and its first skin as an air-breathing insect.

The gas, under the outer skin, reflects light and gives the nymph a definite glint, which is what the gold head emulates.

When we cast out a team of nymphs at the end of a floating fly line, we expect them to sink close to the bottom of the river.

This is where growing nymphs live out most of their lives and where the trout will be looking for them.

When they are due to leave the water the nymphs start regularly swimming toward the surface.

For several days the nymphs will decide that the time is not right for them to take to the air and they swim back to the bed of the river again.

Once they realise what is happening the trout will start to look upwards. They will either intercept the swimming nymphs on their way up or on their way down.

This is what the anglers are trying to take advantage of.

By suspending our nymphs at different depths we hope that the trout will be tempted to take one or other of them.

The floating fly can support the weight of the nymphs, but the trout can pull it under the surface while being unaware of any resistance.

In the lower reaches it was more common to find anglers using a float to support a worm or a maggot in the roughest of streams.

They need something that is large enough to be seen from a distance and resist the various pulls of the current acting on it from a lot of different directions at once.

When conditions were reasonable the anglers could catch small trout, but the larger specimens eluded them.

We are entitled to expect this month to be warmer.

We anticipate a sudden rush of hatching insects and we hope that the trout will be so desperate to build up their strength that they will feed on anything that looks remotely like a living insect.

Sport should be fast and furious for most of the month.

The peak of activity might, initially, start in the middle of the day but there will soon be a separate dawn rise and a gloaming rise by the time we get to the end of the month.