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Remember Slackrafts? Around 2011 that was my made-up word from for cheap, vinyl, ultra-low-psi pooltoys using the same technology as children’s paddling pools.
At the time they were some 3000% cheaper than the then dominant US-made TPU Alpackas (left), while looking vaguely similar to the paddle curious adventurer. For that price you really did wonder could there be so much difference? Experimentation proved the answer proved to be yes: a good TPU packraft is 3001% more enjoyable to paddle and 3002% more durable than a vinyl PoS.

Just before the subsequent Chinese-made packraft onslaught which must have just about peaked by now, Slackrafts was a dirt cheap way of trying ‘packrafting’ without the expense, responsive performance or durability.
All you had to do was keep the thing from puncturing or bursting long enough to make up you mind. That might take a few hours or a few of days, especially once you cut off the outer chamber to make a slimmer, less bin-bag like raft (left) which retained adequate buoyancy for lighter paddlers. A decade or more ago various chums and I experimented with Slackrafts locally as well as in France, Scotland and remote northwest Australia, chartering a light plane to the headwaters of the Fitzroy, Australia’s longest river.

Fast forward to 2025 and YT algos led me to a bunch of Parkouriste youtubers called Storror with no less than 11m followers. In 2024 they set off in a boat-train of Intex and BestWay slackrafts for a paddle-less drift along the swiftly flowing Canal de la Toba, a hillside waterway of viaducts and spooky tunnels paralleling the Rio Jucar in Cuenca. The Toba starts near the town of Uña, midway between Madrid and Valencia, providing a reliable feed for a power station down the valley.

The Canal de la Toba is very much not a recognised recreational paddle backed up by a leaflet in the local tourist board. In fact it’s almost certainly illegal or severely discouraged and could be deadly – like many of Storror’s hugely popular parkouring stunts – or indeed the Kebab Death Tunnel Weir (above) on a bad day.

At one point just before entering a long tunnel they realise that using these rowing rafts backwards, with the thinner, flat-ended stern in front, puts your mass in the much more buoyant ‘bow’, so eliminating annoying back-end swamping when slowing down or when a breeze-driven wavelet passes by.

Going blunt end down does nothing for hydrodynamics, steering or speed, but in the vid the floaters let the canal’s current do the work 12km to the ‘meat-grinder’ grill at the canal’s end, above Villalba de la Sierra.
The entire cost of Storror’s seven-boat flotilla was still probably less than the cheapest TPU packraft you can buy today, and like many of the best filmed adventures, it came across as less dangerous than it looked. In a packraft it might have been too easy but let us take heart that the Spirit of Slackrafting lives on.