Thursday September 5 2013 Jenner CA.
It wasn’t’ very windy when I got there, but
I arrived at Jenner just before eleven this morning and put my boat in the water. It was a little breezy, but not too bad. The sun was shinning nicely too.
I paddled across the river to Penny Island and sat for a bit before heading on up the river to eagle’s landing.
I passed by a snowy egret on the way. It was walking away from me as I passed.
And these biologists went on by me and stopped to get data from the devices they had on a buoy, just ahead of me. I like to chat with them when I can, but since they have a motor, I don’t catch up to them much. The wind started to pick up too.
I sat around in my yak by eagles landing for about an hour before heading down the backside of Penny island in an increasing wind. By the time I got to the west end of Penny island the wind had picked up and now it was real windy. I sat in the slot out of the wind near the west end of the island for awhile before crossing over to the end of the island where some white pelicans where sleeping. By this time the wind was really blowing me around and it was hard to paddled and keep the boat straight while trying to get some pics and keep the camera dry too.
This is the group of white pelicans I passed on the west end of Penny Island. They were all asleep until I approached them.
I really had to work at paddling down toward the river’s mouth the wind was blowing so hard and taking my camera out to get a picture was quite a challenge as if I set my paddle down, the wind would try to take it from me, so I had to be quick.
This is a photo showing the waves from the wind and it’s as close to the river’s mouth as I got, as I didn’t see anywhere to get out of the wind to take a break down that way, so after a bit I headed on back toward Penny Island. By now, the wind was up good. I had to be careful it didn’t take my paddle away and also make sure most of the water from the waves and spray off the bow didn’t get my camera wet. It got me fairly wet just the same, but I dry out.
I tried to get in close to the pelicans to get another shot of them, holding my paddle in one hand and the camera in the other. One time the wind caught my paddle and almost tipped me over sideways, but at the last second I turned my paddle blades so they cut the wind and just barely avoided a tip over which would have been the end of my camera.
As you can see the waves were up which the pelicans didn’t seem to mind much. They were trying to take a snooze.
I let the wind carry me back to the visitors center and was off the water around 2 pm and went on home for a nap.
As I was walking around the yard a bit later I spied this little one foot King snake. I know there are quite of few of these guys around here, but you don’t see them that often.
It didn’t like it’s picture taken and crawled off in a short time.
After another nap, I went to get a glass of water and noted that there was almost no water pressure, so I got on the little four wheeler and rode up to check on the water tanks and the water spring. The tanks were empty, but there was some water coming in. I went on up the hill to the spring and found it working, but the amount of water coming out of the hill had slowed a bit, which it does at this time of the year.
Running out of water is a signal for the people on the system to be conservative and not use so much water. We’ll see tomorrow if the system starts to recovery or I will have to tap some more temporary springs into the system.
Once I had that under control, I came back home and made some butter pecan, caramel ice cream that turned out real tasty. I ate a bunch of it while I was making it. Yummmmmmm. :O)
I had a blast paddling around in the wind today and I’m still sampling the ice cream for a great day.