Monday, September 22, 2014

Paddling on the Russian River Estuary 09-22-14

I took a ride over to my friend, Bob’s to see if he could help me with the download of windows 8.1 into my new laptop. We tried it a couple of weeks ago but it didn’t work.
I got to Bob’s around 11:00 and we set up the computer to do the download. This download takes several hours to complete so we decided to go kayaking at Jenner while the download was running.
We waited until the download had started and progressed for a while. When we were satisfied that it was well under way, we got in Bob’s car and drove to Jenner.
We launched our boats into the estuary.
The mouth of the river is closed at this time so the estuary is like a long lake.
The wind was down so the water was pretty flat and the paddling was easy. We headed across the water toward Penny Island.

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About half way across I realized that I didn’t have a hat. I mentioned it to Bob and he said he had one in his car and would get it for me. “What a guy” :o)

The ramp was full of people launching their boats so we continued paddling to the island where we stopped and waited for the crowd to clear. After about 30 minutes the boats had all been launched and Bob headed back to get me a hat.

I paddled a little further up the river to a channel that goes through the island’s east end. I waited in the channel taking pictures of Jenner through the limbs of a Eucalyptus tree

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until Bob returned with a hat for me.
You can see Bob at the ramp in the lower left of this picture.

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From there we slowly paddled along the south shore of the river passing some Mergansers resting on a log

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and a gull on the other end.

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A little further up stream we stopped at the otters log for a break.

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We watched the cows and geese cavorting on the opposite shore.

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We left the otters log and continued along the shore passing Paddy’s Rock.

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On our side of the river I noticed this interesting rock outcrop above the trees.

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Eventually we came to a place where Bob found several Muskrat nests. There is a pretty good landing here in the Sword Grass.

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We disembarked and followed a trail into the woods.

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As you can see the trail is a little rough and goes through some large stands of salmon berries.
The salmon berries are a bit thorny.

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Along this trail are several Muskrat nests.

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Here is Bob checking out the entrance to one of the nests.

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We left the Muskrats to their slumbers and headed back down stream towards Jenner.
As we floated along we watched the trees for a couple of Yellow Jacket
nests that Bob had seen before. They aren’t easy to spot but we did find one of them.

Can you find the yellow jacket nest in these trees?

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No? Ok, here is a blow up of the nest.

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After checking out the wasp nest we continued our paddle.

A short distance past the nest a Blue Herron flue into these Cedar trees.

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As we approached Penny Island we saw another Blue Herron standing at the entrance to the channel.

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I just happened to get a shot of him taking off.

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As we paddled through the channel I got this picture of one of the abandoned buildings on the island.

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As we approached the boat ramp the fog line can be seen hanging a few miles off the coast.

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We got off the water

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and headed back to Bob’s place to check on my computer. 
Unfortunately the down load didn’t work again. After messing with the computer for a while we started another down load and I left the computer with Bob and went home.

It was a good day on the water.

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