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Albuquerque will start drinking from the Rio Grande next year as part of the San Juan-Chama drinking water project, but the actual water supply, piped in from the Colorado River basin, has been flowing past the city for decades.

What have your government leaders done with it in the meantime?

They've used it to make friends with fish and farmers alike, and this week, upstream rafters jumped on that list too.

By timing the release of water from El Vado Reservoir just right, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority and its partner federal agencies can make an especially scenic portion of the Chama River raftable, to the delight of outfitters and outdoor enthusiasts alike.

Normally running about 100 cubic feet per second (a basketball is about a cubic foot), the river would jump to 600 cubic feet per second on the weekends this summer. Without that pulse, rafting couldn't happen.

"What allows us to flow through this canyon," said Steve Miller, the president of the New Mexico River Outfitters Association, "is the planned release of water."

The deals amount to a creative transfer of water from one holding area (El Vado) to another (Abiquiu), and over the years the utility has lent out its unused water.

In 2002, at the height of a severe drought, the utility gave 70,000 acre-feet to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District for farmers to use. That's about as much water as the city of Albuquerque uses in eight months.

"It really helped save an agricultural season," said Dennis Domrzalski, a spokesman for the conservancy district.

Irrigation, which normally extends through October, looked in danger of ending in June.

"Without that (water), who knows what could have happened," Domrzalski said. "Farmers might have gone out of business. That water was just a blessing."

Silvery minnows might have said the same thing, if they were able to talk.

In 2002, the city leased 40,000 acre-feet of water to the federal Bureau of Reclamation to help mimic a flood. Normally, springtime flooding inspires the minnows to spawn, but there wasn't enough snow in the mountains that year to get the job done.

Call it common courtesy.

"What we've tried to do is cooperate and try to help people when we've had the opportunity to do it," said John Stomp, the water resources manager for the utility authority.

But next year, the party will be over as Albuquerque starts diverting the water and filtering it for drinking.

"Now we have to use the water for ourselves," Stomp said.

The arrangement with the rafters should be able to continue, but doling out water to minnows and farmers will become a thing of the past.

The impact of that is hard to predict, since it depends on the severity of future droughts.

"I'm not going to play a speculation game,because we just don't know," Domrzalski said. "If it's severe and really bad, that could be a problem" for farmers whose irrigation season had to end prematurely.