This season has been a strange one so far.
I usually prefer evening fishing, and in a normal spring I would expect the last few hours of light to give the best chance of surface activity on a loch.
This year, though, the evenings have been especially difficult, and I suspect the main driver has been temperature. On a Scottish loch, even a small change in air temperature can alter the upper layer of water enough to move the feeding window.
After cold nights, the margins and top few feet start the day well below where I would want them, and if the air turns cold again after 6 pm that shallow band loses heat quickly.
That suppresses buzzer movement, shortens any period of surface feeding, and keeps trout from cruising high in the water. In other words, the calendar says evening rise, but the loch is still behaving like early spring.
The fish are not absent altogether; they are simply feeding on a different schedule and in different parts of the loch.
Most of the useful activity has been concentrated between about 1:30 and 3:00 pm, which is the point when sheltered bays, darker margins, and the top layer over shallow shelves have had enough time to gain a little warmth.
That makes sense from both an entomology and a trout point of view.
Early in the season, hatches are often driven less by the clock than by accumulated warmth through the day, and on stillwater that warmth is often localised rather than evenly spread.
If the water only lifts slightly by early afternoon, that can be enough to start buzzers or small midges moving, but not enough to sustain activity into the evening.
The trout then take advantage of a narrow window by patrolling productive edges such as drop offs beside the bank, the first ledge off a shallow flat, or wind lanes that gather food without forcing them to work too hard for it.
Once the afternoon slips away, however, so does the promise. The evenings have been extremely slow, with the fish seeming to switch off almost completely. What I am seeing is not just fewer rises, but far fewer signs of trout committing to the top few feet of water.
Fish that might cruise a bank or show over a shelf in the afternoon are no longer willing to stay high, and the classic late rise has simply not materialised.
On a loch, that is often the giveaway that the buzzer hatch is stalling before it becomes a proper feeding event.
When the surface layer cools, ascending pupae lose some of that steady upward movement, and without a regular concentration of vulnerable insects in the upper water, trout slide back off the shelf or hold deeper along the break.
From a tactical point of view, that means an evening spent waiting on static dries can be a poor use of time.
On these colder days, a team of small wets, buzzers, or an unweighted emerger fished in the upper layers during the brief afternoon window has been far more logical than persisting with a straight dry-fly approach into the evening.
That, for me, is the main lesson this season keeps teaching: fish the conditions on the loch, not the idea of the season. In early season Scottish loch fishing
The warmest and most stable part of the day often dictates everything, from buzzer movement to how high trout are prepared to sit in the water column. When the loch is cold, feeding windows are shorter, patrol routes are tighter, and presentation matters more because fish are less willing to rise far or chase a fly that is moving unnaturally.
It also means location matters more than habit. Instead of waiting for an evening rise that may never happen, it makes more sense to watch for subtle clues in the early afternoon: a slight lift in air temperature, a few buzzers in the margins, one or two fish showing over a shelf, or trout beginning to move along a windward bank.
Those signs tell you far more than the clock does.
Until the season settles and the evening temperatures hold, I think the better approach is to treat this as technical loch fishing: carry a thermometer, pay attention to which banks are warming first, and be ready to switch between buzzers, small wets, emergers, and even a midge dry only when the fish are clearly committed to the surface.