No luck this time around. Water levels will stay high through the Memorial Day weekend and quickly start dropping Monday into Tuesday. Locally, we'll have a lot of rain all day Friday so Tuesday might slip into Wednesday but everything north of us looks good and that's where we get into problems as the watershed funnels down into our stretch of river. Long story short, this weekend is shot for canoe camping trips but next weekend is looking probable.

We still have day trips going out though it's worth keeping in mind that you'll be in the boat pretty much all day as the sandbars will be underwater. The silver lining is that you're able to paddle into the trees and down back channels of the river that aren't normally accessible. Either way, if you plan to head out on the river this weekend, you should have some basic paddling skills - I wouldn't recommend this as your first time.

The graph below will continue to update with the most recent river forecast. We aim to be under 13.5' and we've got a 12-24 hour lag as the water travels from this gauge to our location downstream.

5/21 7:07am Update:

Just waiting on this morning's river forecast update. Castle Rock about 36 hours upstream is still putting out a lot less water than expected given what is going on upstream of Castle Rock. This is not promising as I think it'll push elevated flow rates further into the weekend. That said, our current plan is that we will officially cancel overnight trips, day trips are still good to go, and while there will be no guarantees of places to camp, there should be at least a couple if water levels stay below 25kcfs (expected). So, if any overnighters want to give it a chance with the expectation that no legal places to camp (no shoreline camping!) means you'll finish as a day trip and we'll refund the unused days. (This part is still unofficially official, emails will go out later today confirming)

==================================

The most recent river forecasts are out and they aren't great. After taking into account the rain forecasted over the next 24 hours, it's expected that river levels will maintain their elevated status. Furthermore, our unstable weather system will remain in the area throughout the week, possibly right into Memorial Day weekend.

At this time of year, there isn't a lot of greenery to soak up all of that extra moisture so soils are quick to saturate and then everything runs straight off the land into the river system. That means even relatively small storms over a broad area of our watershed cause problems with putting sandbars underwater.

We won't make an official cancellation call for another few days, waiting until after the forecasts take account for actual rainfall, but it's not looking great. If you haven't already made plans to be on the river, you may want to hold off on this one. For everyone else with reservations, we'll be in touch via email.

To get an idea of how it's going, we aim to be under 13.5' at the Portage river gauge. The forecasts are typically updated everyday around 9am and 9pm.

Looks like our high waters won't quite be out of the system before this weekend so our first official day will be May 25th. Long range forecast has some rain/storms over the weekend but so far this appears limited to southern WI and lower which is great news for us and means I'm pretty optimistic about getting everyone out over Memorial Day Weekend (though we won't be confident one way or the other until next Monday or Tuesday).

As always, we're aiming to be in (or very near) the white area of this graph.

It's been a cold and wet spring so I propose we're due for a reversion to the mean with a hot, sun filled summer. Water levels are currently running well above their long term average with more wet weather in the near future. This means sandbars likely won't reappear for another week or two at the earliest. Luckily, for us, our opening weekend is still a few weeks out.

Eventually. But the days are noticeably longer, the weather is (mostly) getting more mild, and reservations have been building. That's good enough to hold me over until the leaves come back. In the meantime, our reservation system is open!

We've officially called it quits for the winter.  Reservations can now be made for the 2019 season starting in May!

Update: Water levels will come up a few inches over the weekend.  Not enough to cancel trips but sandbars will be in shorter supply than usual.  Everyone will have a place to camp (there's only about 14 seperate groups going out) you might just have to share the larger ones. === Our last regularly scheduled weekend of the season is upon us and it's gonna feel like fall.  Crisp weather with sunny skies and highs in the mid 60s, lows in the 40s - ideal campfire weather.  Water temps are still in the high 60s so while swimming probably isn't going to be great, you'll be fine if you accidentally go in. There is one area I'm keeping a close eye on though.  We recently had a lot of flooding near Labor Day weekend and while the sandbars are back out, the water levels are still slightly elevated above normal levels.  We've had a little rain this week and likely one more storm before the weekend.  I don't expect it to cause any issues (all of the gauges and predictions look fine) but based on our freaky weather patterns this month, it's always possible things get weird.  If that were to happen, there will be an update within hours of those updated river predictions - but again, as of right now all indicators look good and there's plenty of places for you to camp out.

Water levels continue to recede as expected.  We'll have plenty of sandbars out for this Sep 15-16 weekend and with clear skies, highs in the mid 80s, and favorable winds, conditions will be about as good as they get.  Now that we're past Labor Day expect to have most of the river to yourself.  Our rental numbers drop 75% from peak season just two weeks ago.

What was forecast to be a small amount of rain has, once again, turned ugly. Over the past two days most of Wisconsin has been hit with multiple rounds of high rainfall storms. Current river projections look bad. Really bad. Our stretch of river is potentially looking at 50kcfs by the end of the weekend (we cancel trips at 15kcfs, normal is 5kcfs). As such, it's a safe bet that we will not be running trips this weekend. All of that said, the stationary front that has been causing all of this record flooding is finally moving out of our area. The next 10 days look to be sunny and warm which will allow the watershed to quickly draw down back towards normal levels. While this weekend is almost certainly out of the question, I fully expect water levels to return to normal levels before the following weekend. The current weather forecast is about the best thing we could hope for.

Current river forecast (we aim to be in the white area for good sandbar conditions)

We've picked up 3-6x more rain than normal over most of the state since 8/22/18

Despite all of the rain and flooding last week (and really the two weeks prior to that as well), we're looking pretty good for the weekend. Most of that rain was local or south of us leaving the vast majority of the watershed relatively dry. This means that while we were at high water over Labor Day weekend, it's already mostly drained out of the system. Sandbars will continue to emerge over the next couple of days even with the somewhat damp weather. Finally, by this weekend, the stationary front will begin shifting south and east getting us out of the line of fire. The only real concern left is the chance for a few inches of rain to fall over the central/northern part of Wisconsin today and tomorrow. If this is a fairly normal quick moving storm we won't have any issues with high water later in the week. We'll know for sure sometime Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, the actual forecast for this weekend has been improving quite a bit over the past few days so we're hoping that trend continues as well through the work week. Ryan