Catching Up With ‘River’ Dave Johnson—On The Cusp Of Super Cat Fest West 2024

Starting tomorrow and running through Saturday, Super Cat Fest West will be the talk of Lake Havasu City, Ariz., the longstanding epicenter of the West Coast go-fast boating. The event, which was the brainchild of Alvin Heathman, the founder and producer of the original Super Cat Fest West at the Lake of the Ozarks in Central, is entering its fourth year.

One of Lake Havasu’s most popular high-performance powerboating events, Super Cat Fest West 2024 kicks off tomorrow. Photos by Tom Leigh copyright Tommy Gun Images.

Last year, Lake Havasu City resident Dave Johnson, better known as River Dave to performance-boating fans across the country for the online community dubbed RiverDavesPlace.com he founded in 2007, joined forces with Heathman to produce Super Cat Fest West. With Heathman and Johnson at the helm, the 2023 Lake Havasu happening reached impressive heights, one of which included raising more than $200,000 for local charities.

With the opening day of Super Cat Fest West just around the corner, I reached out to Johnson for a quick interview. And despite that the 47-year-old entrepreneur was working hard on last-minute details, he took time to respond via text message.

Here’s what he had to say.

Why inspired you to start your River Dave’s Place?

At the time, hotboat.com had taken kind of a turn for the south. I started two other forums with partners previous to RDP that were both successful, but unfortunately they didn’t work out. That’s why it’s called RDP—is I wanted no confusion over who owned it moving forward (laughs).

You built an amazing online community. What were the keys to that?

The key to RDP’s success is two things. First, most online forums are topic-driven, meaning if you talk about things outside of the topic it gets deleted. RDP is lifestyle-driven, meaning visitors can talk about everything. But the common theme is we are all boaters.

More than one of the world’s most popular online boating communities, riverdavesplace.com has established a physical presence.

The second part of why it is successful is we care a great deal about user-experience and making sure that it is as good as it can be while they are on the site. We currently run 160,000 unique IPs month through RDP, and our Facebook business page has a little over 100,000 followers. The RDP Facebook group page has 43,000 followers, RDP’s Instagram account has a 100,000-plus follower and our newsletter has around 30,000 subscribers.

How has social media affected your community and online communities in general?

Social media portals like Facebook and Instagram have taken out a lot of online forums, so we doubled down and used social to promote RDP. In short, when Facebook came out our numbers actually doubled and continue to rise. And many of the members on RDP consider the site be the only form of “social media” they use.

Johnson (in baseball cap at the 2021 Speed On The Water Key West Bash) is ready for this week’s Super Cat Fest West happening.

You’ve always been something of an organizer, but last year you took a big step and worked alongside Alvin Heathman to do your first Super Cat Fest West. How did that come about and why did you do it?

Alvin Heathman and Ray Lee of Speedboat magazine did a Super Cat Fest out here a few years before and needed some help navigating a few local problems, which I handled for them. Later they asked me to partner with them but I was unable to due to a family member being hospitalized around that time and eventually passing. Alvin hit me up to do one two or three years later so I said yes. I wanted it to be a larger-scale event with a big charity auction to raise money for local kids charities. My first-year goal was to raise $100,000 we raised more than $200,000.

Some of the hottest go-fast boat hardware in the world will be on hand at Super Cat Fest West this week.

What are shooting for this year?

This year my goal is $300,000 and my think we will be in the pocket if everything goes to plan. And this year’s turn out is over 120 boats—we are sold out for the amount of docks I was able to acquire this year.

My initial goal when I started was to try and recreate the massive amounts of money that the Lake Powell Challenge was raising years back. I think we will be close to that this year or next. But my goal has evolved now to try and make this the number one boating charity event in the country. I think with Alvin’s connections across the country, our auctioneer, the generous donations from participants and corporations combined it is very possible.

We will have to see how this year goes, but if everything goes smoothly I think the sky is the limit. It’s my goal and Alvin’s to change the landscape of this community for kids to make sure they all have the opportunities that many of us enjoyed growing up.