2026 World Championship - The Salmon River Leg

There’s a lot of talk going around about the 2026 World Championship Jet Boat Race. I will try my best to inform people how special this race will be. Enthusiasm, technicality, spring water conditions, and of course safety were among the many talking points in our choosing of what rivers to host the 2026 World Championship Jet boat race.

The Salmon River is spoken as to be the “Holy Grail” of jet boat racing. Its steep canyon walls, swift currents and torrential rapids make it a world wide favorite for photographic enthusiasts of jet boat racing.

Each year, Riggins Idaho hosts this world famous event with a challenging 8 mile long coarse on the upper Salmon River at Riggins.

Because of the immense speed and the challenge of running large rapids in today’s race boat designs, and a couple other concerns, our committee elected to hold the World Championship race on a different stretch of the Salmon.

For this race, the leg will start 33 miles downstream of Riggins at Hammer Creek. The racers will advance up stream about 25 miles to Lucille, and return. This venue, albeit still challenging is void of the class 3 and 4 rapids that most racers envision when they think of the Salmon River.

For the fans, it will be exciting to see some of these guys run this flat mild course reaching speeds of well over 150 mph!!

Please share this with all our Jet Boat racing friends and tell them how excited we are that they are coming to Idaho on May 8-10 -- don't miss the 2026 World Championship Salmon River Leg.

A powerboat speeding through the water during a race