Category: Behind the Boats

Water levels have dropped back near long term averages i.e. the sandbars are out in force. Long range forecast also looks excellent with only Thursday afternoon/evening having a chance of rain, everything else is sunny in the low 80s. This is downright ideal conditions. We’re sold out this weekend and will likely sell out the…

Everyone says this every year but, summer is flying by. We’ve only got a handful of weeks left in the summer canoe camping season though people are certainly taking advantage, we’ve been sold out for the upcoming weekend since early July. Weather forecast could be better, but it could also be worse. Highs in the…

First of all, have you guys seen the weather forecast? Freakin’ amazing! Sunny, hot, not humid, minimal chance of storms, and low winds into the next work week. I don’t think that’s happened yet this season. As for water levels – little bit of rain today but didn’t seem to be enough to cause any…

Today looks like it’ll be about as high as it goes and the reports we’ve heard back were all positive. Water levels at most points upstream are receding and with the dry forecast we should be out of the woods. Water level outlook above Portage in particular has been cut in half with a further…

Less than 2″ of rain fell last night. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, only that it could have been worse. We did see the dam at Prairie Du Sac come up 2kcfs which wasn’t unexpected and I believe it’s now leveled off around 12kfs. To put that number in perspective, 15kcfs is…

Our “current river conditions” graphs are a little misleading as they measure water levels 30 miles downstream of where all of our trips end. The local rainfall that we got is filtering in through all of the tributaries and the vast majority of that increase is happening at or below our location which is why…

Lots of rain again locally and to the south of our watershed. I don’t envy some of you guys down south, especially with more coming. For us, while we did see an immediate rise in local water levels, it’s an overall small impact on our trips compared to the middle third of the river valley.…

Quick update – water levels will drop substantially in 2 days leaving us tons of sandbars. Hopefully they’ll stay like that but we’ve got 50/50 chances of storms Tuesday through Friday so if most of those days get significant rain we could have some issues. I don’t think it’s likely, but certainly possible. Updates will…

The dam two days upstream at Castle Rock doubled their output a few hours ago.  Trips are still fine, it just means we’ll see waters rise a bit on Saturday so fewer sandbars than I initially anticipated.  This mostly means you can expect to share the bigger ones as this is also one of (if…

If you’ve got a trip this weekend and you’re one of the 95% of our customers that live in Madison, Milwaukee, or Chicago – you’re probably swimming through puddles at the moment thinking there’s no way canoe trips can go out with this much water. Good news (up here at least), the vast majority of…