ALTHOUGH I do try to fish every month of the year, I am a great believer in the traditional closed seasons—once termed ‘fence months’—because gleeful anticipation lies at the heart of angling and you tend to appreciate something more if there is a certain difficulty in obtaining it.
By the time spring comes to the glen up here, I am usually suffering from a severe case of cabin fever—or ‘the shack nasties’, as they say in Maine. I can tell it’s spring, because when I take our cocker spaniel Pompey for his early-morning constitutional, I no longer cast a moon-shadow onto the frosted lawn. This