If you have fished in North America your whole life, the first thing to unlearn about the Amazon is the calendar. There is no opening day here and nothing closes. The river works twelve months a year.
What changes is how much water is in it, and that changes everything else: which species are moving, where the boats can go, and whether you are casting into flooded forest or onto an open sandbank. Rain in the headwaters lifts the Roosevelt well above its banks for part of the year and drops it to its bones for another part, and the fish reorganise themselves around that.
/ Month by month
The operation sorts the year into three levels. Here is where each month falls.
January to May · high water
The rains and the tributaries push the river above its banks and the forest floods. The water is deep, the current is strong, and the fish that own that kind of water are the big ones on the bottom.
This is catfish season, and the list is the heavyweight list: redtail catfish, piraíba, jaú, cachara, caparari. On the sporting end, apapá and corvina, both of which will take a fly and both of which fight above the water more than below it.
Come in these months if what you want is a fight that lasts, and if you do not mind that it happens somewhere you cannot see.
June, July, November and December · mid water
The river drains back toward its normal level. These four months sit between the two extremes, and that is exactly what makes them worth knowing about: both groups are in play at once.
If you have never fished this river and you do not have a species you are hunting, this is the widest week of the year. You can spend a morning on the bottom and an afternoon casting at structure, and both make sense on the same day.
August to October · low water
The lowest volume of the year. The sandbanks come up, the beaches open, and the river narrows to its channels, which concentrates the fish in a way that no other season does.
This is the scaled-fish season, and it is the one most visitors picture when they picture the Amazon: peacock bass, bicuda, cachorra, matrinchã, jatuarana, aruanã. Visual strikes, surface takes, and the season where fly fishing earns its place.
So which month?
Start from what you want, not from the calendar:
- You want the biggest fish in the river · January to May
- You want peacock bass on the surface · August to October
- You want to see as much as possible in one week · June, July, November, December
- You are bringing a fly rod and one rod only · low water, and talk to us first
One thing we will not do is tell you how many fish you will land. We will tell you what is in the river and when it moves, and the rest is fishing.
