It started with a school bus and 50 inner tubes
In the spring of 1987, Ed Kowalski bought a retired school bus at a Comal County auction for $900, painted "RIVER TUBES $3" on the side, and parked it in a gravel lot on River Road. He didn't have a phone line the first two summers. People just showed up, and they kept showing up.
Ed's daughter Dana grew up handing out lifejackets and patching tubes with a bicycle repair kit. She took over day-to-day operations in 2009 when Ed's knees finally lost their argument with the boat ramp. Ed still comes by most mornings to drink coffee at the counter and tell customers the river was better in the nineties. (It wasn't. It's the same river.)
Dana's kids, Travis and June, are the third generation — Travis manages the shuttle fleet and June runs the front counter and our social media, which she'll tell you is the harder job of the two.
What we believe
A float on the Guadalupe should be simple. You park once, you pay once, and everything after that — tube, jacket, shuttle, river advice — is our job to get right. A few things we're stubborn about:
- We tell you the truth about conditions. If the river's too low to be fun, we'll say so before you pay, not after. We've refunded whole Saturdays because the flow dropped overnight.
- Kids wear lifejackets. Not negotiable, never has been. We've been upstream of two rescues in 39 years and both times the jacket did its job.
- The river stays clean. We run a volunteer cleanup float every September — last year 140 people pulled 61 bags of trash out of our stretch. Mesh bags are free at the counter all season.
"People ask what the secret is. There's no secret. Same lot, same river, same family. You just have to not screw it up for forty years." — Ed Kowalski
The crew
Summer staff runs about 30 people — mostly Canyon High and Texas State students, a couple of retired teachers driving buses, and Marcus, who has worked the tube counter every summer since 2003 and has personally patched more rubber than anyone in Comal County. In the off-season we're down to six full-timers doing repairs, bookings and school group planning.
Where we sit on the river
Our outpost is at 9380 River Rd, between the third and fourth crossing — the stretch locals call "the horseshoe." It's below Canyon Dam, which means cold, clear, dam-controlled water that keeps flowing in August when other Texas rivers turn to gravel. The float from our ramp to the fourth crossing takes about 2.5 to 3 hours at normal flow.