Water is Up – Wisconsin Canoe Company

8/11/21 Evening Update: Oof. For a few sweet hours it looked like everything was coming together. Unfortunately, a front came through today that kicked off a lot of rain further west than forecast which put it right in the heart of our watershed. Water is now shooting out of the dams upstream at a significantly higher rate than expected and it’s more than enough to keep us off the river Friday morning through the weekend (we needed to see >12kcfs on the graph below). For those of you that were still holding out for trips on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday – you’ll get a cancellation email with your full refund sometime tomorrow. Wish it would have worked out!

8/11/21 Morning Update: Starting to see that drop come in at Castle Rock. It’s not there yet but certainly heading in the right direction and will definitely shorten up the chart that’s currently forecast. Friday trips are still pretty unlikely to go out but I’m up to an even 50/50 on Saturday (official call for Friday comes tomorrow mid-morning one way or the other).

8/9/21 Sandbars are going under today. Still TBD if they’ll be back for the weekend. Friday is looking unlikely, but Saturday is plausible (though still probably a little worse than 50/50 odds). Really hoping this works out because the weather forecast this weekend is downright perfect for river camping.

At this point I’m watching the data out of Castle Rock because once that drops below 10-12kcfs it’ll correlate with our sandbars coming out 36-48 hours later (e.g. a drop to this level by ~9am Thursday would make Friday trips doable, a drop by ~9am Friday would make Saturday trips doable). River levels up there are currently peaking so it’s really just waiting to see when they start to come down.

The river forecasts have been getting revised down a bit the past few runs and I think we’ll see the tail end drop off much faster than currently charted which is why I’m not ruling anything out this early in the week. River forecast updates happen most days at ~8am and 8pm so keep an eye on it over the next couple days.

-Ryan

Aiming to be under 12kcfs at Castlerock and (more importantly) under 14′ at Portage