It's Here !

Well, it actually arrived last Sunday but today we moved onto British Summer Time or BST and the clocks went forward one hour.

What am I talking about ? Spring of course. The vernal equinox or spring equinox took place at 7:21 p.m. ET last Sunday, March 20, 2011 here in the Northern Hemisphere. This Sunday it feels a bit more like it as we will have an hours more daylight time in the evening.

I'm not going to go into the technicalities of the vernal equinox but a good place for details about it is included in this article from National Geographic.
 
Anyway, back onto what is happening today and British summer time. What does it mean ? British Summer Time (BST) is the civil time during the summer months in the United Kingdom during which the clocks are advanced from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) by one hour. The British Summer Time period begins on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October. Though initially popular after its introduction in 1916, the practice now divides opinion. It was first established by the Summer Time Act of 1916, after a campaign by builder William Willett. His original proposal was to move the clocks forward by 80 minutes, in 20-minute weekly steps on Sunday in April and by the reverse procedure in September. At this time BST began on 21 May and ended on 1 October. From what I understand BST has only been deviated from a couple of times and during the second world war we were on double BST. A full article on the matter is here at Wikipedia .
 
So, what does it mean for us anglers, pretty much nothing I suppose as you could've varied your fishing times to take advantage of the extending daylight hours accordingly. However, it will mean that for folk who have to adhere to a standard working week ( which is actually pretty abnormal these days ) they'll be able to get an extra hours fishing in during the week unless they're night fishermen which is an art all in itself.
 
What will it mean for me ? Hopefully some nice troots as we get into those balmy summer's evenings when the broonies love to chase the fly life at the top of the water.
 
Let's wait and see.