Our Story
Started in a Texas workshop.
Ends on a river that matters.
The founder
An engineer, a pilot, an angler — and the wife who runs the same rivers.
Caddis Raft Co. begins with a retired Texas civil engineer who has spent a lifetime in the air, on the water, and under a welder’s hood. Forty-some years in the field taught him that the things you build to last all share a few stubborn traits — measured tolerances, honest materials, and a refusal to dress up what doesn’t need dressing.
His wife runs the same rivers, ties her own flies, and reads water like the rest of us read coffee labels — patiently, deliberately. The two of them have spent enough cold dawns crawling into overpriced rafts to know that the category had quietly drifted away from the people it was built for.
From trailers to rafts
The shop that builds expedition trailers also builds these boats.
Before Caddis Raft Co., the same hands and the same shop were turning out hand-welded offroad expedition trailers — the kind built to follow trucks down the kind of two-track most catalogs pretend doesn’t exist. That work demands the same things a serious raft does: clean welds, honest geometry, and tolerances measured in the field, not on a spec sheet.
When we set out to design these boats, the goal wasn’t to undercut the loud names in the category. It was to bring the trailer-builder’s discipline — engineered first, marketed later — to a market that had quietly drifted into the opposite habit.
— Our promise
“A serious boat shouldn’t cost what a serious truck does.
Two boats. One mission. No noise.”
First production run starts soon.
Join the River Log and we’ll send the specs, the photos from the first run, and a reservation link — before anything goes wide.