A crowdsourced river-conditions site for Comox Valley tubers — live gauge data, weather, tides, and anonymous float reports.

Context

Every summer, the Puntledge River fills up with people on inner tubes drifting from the hatchery down into Courtenay. Whether that float is great, mediocre, or a bad idea changes day to day: the river is dam-controlled, flow and water level move around, weather shifts, and the last stretch is tidal. The information existed — a hydrometric gauge, weather feeds, tide tables, word of mouth — but scattered, and none of it written for someone standing in a parking lot holding a tube.

Puntledge Tube Report is a studio product built to close that gap: one page that says “Good to float” or tells you why not, backed by data and by the people who floated an hour ago.

The product

This is the real application, embedded in demo mode — same components and layout as production, with simulated conditions regenerated on every load. Click any embed to open the live site in a new tab.

puntledge.caCached copy

The home page leads with a plain-language verdict, then backs it up:

• A per-stretch status line. The river isn’t the same the whole way down — Hatchery, Park, Condensory, and Lewis each get their own rating, and closures (like fisheries work at the hatchery put-in) show right on the diagram.
• Water level from crowd reports. Recent floaters rate the level from “way too low” to “way too high”; the site aggregates that into a too-low → ideal → too-high scale with honest, practical copy (“expect bum-scraper shallows”).
• Live public data. Gauge flow in m³/s, current weather, a five-day outlook, sunrise/sunset, and the tides that make the final leg past Condensory Bridge slow when they roll in.
• Safety framing throughout. A standing “sirens mean exit the water immediately” notice for the dam, alert banners for closures, and a disclaimer that the report is generated from unverified reports and public feeds — a decision aid, not a safety call.

Reports without accounts

The data flywheel only works if reporting takes seconds, so there is no sign-up, no login, and no identity. A short anonymous flow asks about the float — which stretches, how the water was — with big tap-target answers designed for someone still standing in the river parking lot.

Anonymous input needs guardrails instead of trust:

• Cloudflare Turnstile keeps bots out of the report flow without making humans solve puzzles.
• Profanity filtering scrubs free-text before it can reach anyone else’s screen.
• Recency over history. The verdict is built from recent reports, and stale data is purged on a schedule — the site cares about today’s river, not last month’s.

The float map serves first-timers: put-ins, take-outs, parking, hazards, the danger zone above the hatchery, and a save-for-offline nudge because reception on the river is spotty.

How it’s built

• Front end — SvelteKit 2 with Svelte 5 (runes), TypeScript throughout. Server-rendered pages, so conditions load fast on a phone in a parking lot.
• Hosting — Cloudflare Workers via the SvelteKit Cloudflare adapter. Pushes to main deploy automatically through GitHub Actions and wrangler.
• Data — Neon serverless Postgres with Drizzle ORM and drizzle-kit migrations. Scheduled purges keep expired report data out of the database entirely.
• Abuse resistance — Turnstile on the report flow, profanity filtering on text, and no accounts to steal.
• Observability — Sentry for errors and performance.
• Sharing — social/OG images generated on the edge, so a shared link carries the day’s conditions.
• Quality gates — Prettier, ESLint, svelte-check, and Vitest behind a ready script; CI must pass before dev merges to main.

About these embeds

The demos above come from dedicated /demo/* routes on puntledge.ca: the production UI backed by simulated data, with embed-friendly headers so the site can run inside this page at desktop and mobile widths. If puntledge.ca is ever unreachable, the embeds fall back to a cached snapshot captured at build time — the same answer-the-question-first thinking the site itself is built on.

Outcome

• Live and public at puntledge.ca, serving the Comox Valley float season in real time.
• Self-sustaining by design — anonymous crowd reports keep the data fresh without moderation overhead; public feeds fill in the rest.
• Ad-free and community-funded, with a buy-us-a-coffee model instead of tracking or banners.
• A studio showcase — the same end-to-end scope we bring to client work: product thinking, design, build, deployment, and operations from one place.