This Week in Small Craft: October 27th, 2026
posted by
The biggest story this week is the flooding across Southwest Colorado and the Four Corners. Several days of heavy rain sent the San Juan, Animas, and smaller rivers and creeks over their banks, forcing evacuations and water rescues across parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Hundreds were without power around Farmington, flooding damaged wastewater facilities on the Navajo Nation, and officials warned that floodwater could contain sewage, chemicals, and other hazards. Archuleta County officials described damage there as catastrophic.
Our friends at 4Corners Riversports have put together a useful list of places to donate and help, including relief funds for Durango and La Plata County, Archuleta County, the Navajo Nation, and families in Moencopi.
The weird part is that all this water does not mean the drought is over. Drought.gov’s latest Intermountain West update says more than 90 percent of the region was in drought from April through September. Lake Powell received just 37 percent of normal natural streamflow, and major reservoirs entered the new water year at historically low levels. Late-season rain helps, but fixing the larger problem still comes down to a good winter, a real snowpack, and enough spring runoff to actually make it into the rivers.
LateBoof might be one of the more useful little river tools we’ve seen in a while. Text the name of a river run to a phone number from your Garmin inReach or regular phone and it texts back the current gauge reading. No app. No account. No cell service required if you’re using satellite. The run list is still pretty small, but it includes the Middle Fork, Main and Lower Salmon, Grand Canyon, and a growing list of others. You can also text raw USGS and Canadian gauge numbers. Checking the river from the put-in instead of the last gas station with cell service makes an awful lot of sense.
Momentum Electric Marine’s new U2 electric outboard is finally shipping after a long wait. The 2.5kW motor is roughly equivalent to a 5-horsepower gas outboard, but the whole package weighs just 40.5 pounds and breaks into three easy-to-handle pieces: motor, battery, and transom bracket. The battery carries its own display, the motor connects without a separate power cable, and the included charger can take the battery from empty to full in about three hours. There are tradeoffs. No solar or DC charging yet, no remote version, and no option to stash the battery somewhere else in the boat. Still, for small skiffs, dinghies, inflatables, and other little boats where weight and space matter, this is an interesting one to watch. Get yours here.
Paddling Magazine has a fantastic piece on what may be the world’s only flying, firefighting canoe. In the 1920s, Jack Hyde developed a wooden-and-canvas sectional canoe for the Ontario Provincial Air Service. Eventually the boats were cut into four nesting sections that collapsed into a package just five feet long and could be stuffed into bush planes alongside firefighters, pumps, and hoses. Crews would land on remote lakes, assemble the canoe, paddle equipment toward the fire, and sometimes even carry the canoe uphill and fill it with water to create a reservoir for another pump. Boats are tools. This one had a pretty wild job.
Small Boats Monthly has a great story about NEWT, a 15-foot Chesapeake Light Craft Chester Yawl turned into a solar-powered micro cruiser. Rick Retzlaff added decks covered with 400 watts of solar panels, lithium batteries, a customized trolling motor, and a tiny cockpit tent, then took the whole contraption down the Missouri River through the Missouri Breaks National Monument for a week. The river was running roughly three times its normal flow, loaded with debris, and high enough that Retzlaff nearly returned to a flooded take-out. A homemade wooden boat, solar power, muddy water, questionable decisions, and sleeping in something barely larger than a bathtub. Pretty much our kind of story.
WoodenBoat has a piece on the Maine Classic Boat Collective at Buck’s Harbor Marina in Brooksville, Maine. The idea is an old-school boat livery built around classic wooden boats people can actually use. The fleet includes Herreshoff designs, a 1925 Alden Triangle, a Dark Harbor 20, and a 1907 Fay & Bowen launch recently rebuilt and repowered with an electric pod drive. Instead of treating classic wooden boats like museum pieces, they are putting people in them. Seems like a pretty good way to make sure someone still cares about these boats 20 years from now.
Port Townsend Shipwrights has a really cool project involving legendary Seattle racing-shell builder George Pocock. Boatbuilder Steve Chapin is recreating the wooden racing-shell frame visible in a 1923 photograph of Pocock’s University of Washington workshop. There are no original plans, so the Shipwrights 3D-scanned a surviving wooden Pocock four to reverse-engineer the hull shape and create the measurements Chapin needs. Old-school wooden boatbuilding meets a 3D scanner. The finished frame will become part of the restored Pocock workshop at the historic ASUW Shell House.
And one to put on the calendar now: applications for the 2027 SEVENTY48 open November 16 at noon. The race runs 70 miles from Tacoma to Port Townsend under one very simple rule: no motors. Human power only. Row it. Paddle it. Pedal it. Just get there.
Applications close April 15, 2027 at noon, accepted teams need to finish registration by May 1, and the race starts May 28. There is also a $50 “slacker tax” for accepted teams that wait until after March 15 to register, which feels appropriate for an event built around voluntarily suffering your way up Puget Sound.