For the last few days it has been raining pretty hard. The track outside is muddy and rutted and a trip to the river this weekend seems a little pointless as far as fishing is concerned but I may be tempted anyway if only to see the swollen river.
This is the rain we have been waiting for. It is not the first of the autumn and the rivers are not low but this sustained rain will bolster flow in the Río Verde which feeds Concepción and it will raise the levels of the other major reservoirs.
On the river the extra water will offer the barbel and the carp new areas to explore. Already the carp have been busy in the shallows opened up to them by earlier rainfall. The barbel are capable of journeying distances that can be measured in hundreds of metres, kilometres even. An old neighbour of ours reported catching barbel just outside his house on the outskirts of Fuengirola following a spate of rain. The river here is little more than a dry, dusty track for most of the year. He told me that he was amazed to see the fish in the margins. The next day the river continued to flow but the fish were gone.
It strikes me that a sense of how river levels rise and fall must be absolutely critical to the survival of the fish. With increased flow new areas become available for feeding. There are new side streams and culverts and shallows. The main river may become split and the resultant braided streams may offer new habitat and new feeding opportunities but these are temporary windows of opportunity and can have a dark side too. The subsiding river could leave fish stranded in bodies of water cut off from the main river flow and these cul de sacs could be death traps.
One of the “senses” that fish in such shallow rivers must develop is a sense of how the rivers form will be altered by rain so that they can modify their behaviour accordingly. The choices they make – whether to remain in situ, swim upstream, enter shallows, drop back into the main current and so on seem to be absolutely crucial to their survival and how they “read” the river, particularly how it responds to the rain, is a great mystery to me.
The Río Verde feeds Concepción with river water but there has been too little to prevent a huge fall in the water levels of the reservoir.
We could use a little rain here!
fishydreams 