A Paddle, Two Hikes, Pickled Plums and Picking Blueberries

Wednesday June 15, 2016 Jenner CA.

Sometimes the weather guys are wrong about the wind

The weather guys said the wind was going to come up today, but not too bad and some times they’re wrong and they were as it stayed mostly down.

I put my boat in to a little wind and paddled across to Penny Island and decided to go up the river a ways.

I’m headed up along Penny Island to a nice day.river

 

I could see three white pelicans feeding in the island back channel and watched them take off and fly past me headed up the river.pels

 

Ducky’s

And I paddled by this female mallard duck and her little ones. She was keeping an eye on me and leading her duchies around me as best she could. The little ones can’t fly yet, but they can go pretty fast through the water when they have too.ducks

 

Checking on a Turkey vulture’s nest

I made my way up to the muskrat area and sat there for about an hour watching and napping some. I was thinking I needed to go up to the old Indian ladies face rock to see if the turkey vultures used the nest up there this year or not, so I paddled back down the river a little ways and put ashore at the Indian Rock trailhead and hiked up this trail. Lots of poison oak on this trail, impossible to avoid it all.trail

 

The rock

I’m just below the rock and headed up to the top of it for a rest and a look around.rock

 

Nice view looking down river from the top of the rock.rockview

 

Succulents

After a bit of rest I started to look around and was impressed by all the succulent succulents on the rock.

Here’s just one of them. Note the rattlesnake grass in the front.suculent

 

The vulture’s nest

Eventually I did what I came up to do and that was to take a look at the turkey vulture nest I know is here to see if it is active or not.

The nest is in the ferns, or you might say the nest is the ferns as turkey vultures don’t make nests around here, they just find the perfect spot and lay two eggs on the ground.nest

 

I didn’t find any turkey vultures in the nest, but it did look like there might have been a nest here earlier as there was some ferns knocked down, but it looked like nothing had been here for a couple weeks or so. So maybe they vultures left the nest already.

Took a different trail down

When I left the rock to go down the hill, I picked a different trail that goes down through these trees.trees

 

I  made it back to my boat and headed down river going along this spot by otter’s log there. The wind was down to maybe five miles and hour or so, not bad at all.jenner

 

These geese landed here near me as I watched.geese

 

Another hike looking for berries

I was thinking some blackberries might be good to eat, but did I want to go for another walk? If I could get ashore easily on Penny Island I decided I’d look for some berries.

I could get ashore easily here, so I went ashore and ate some berries.pennyisland

 

After eating some berries, I got back in my boat and headed for the boat ramp to a light wind.

Just leaving Penny island here ready to cross over the river to the boat ramp.jenner2

 

I put my boat on the car and drove on home for a nap and something to eat.

Making pickled plums

I’ve been contemplating making some pickled plums for awhile now and have been studying how the Japanese do it as it’s one of their favorite foods. And I just so happen to have a huge crop of plums this year so all I could lose is mostly some salt and some sugar if I screw things up, so what the hey, I pickled some plums.

I started out just to do a gallon of green ones, which are the second jar from the right, but then I had some more solution left so I did the two little ones to the left of that one. Those had water salt and sugar in them.

Then I did the one on the right, which is more salt than sugar and water and riper plums too.

Then I got the crook pot out that Sue Zeller gave me when she showed me how to make sauerkraut in Troy Oregon a number of years ago. In that one, I did layering. That’s when you put a layer of salt down, then plums, then salt, then plums, just like making sauerkraut No water. Cover with a plastic bag full of water to seal the air out and it should make it’s own liquid. The Japanese would then dry these plums after they are cured.

And lastly, I decided one with water, vinegar and salt and sugar should be tried, so I picked some more green plums and made that one up which is the second one from the left.

This is my booty for very little work, an experiment. :O) Yum I hope.plum

 

Winds take my cover apart

Well the wind may have been down at Jenner today, but at my house it must have been pretty gusty as I found my cover to keep the birds out of my blueberry patch blown apart.DSC04010

 

Picking blueberries

I was planning to pick the berries today with Dominique, but she wasn’t around, so I picked as many as I could leaving her the best ones. For some reason picking these berries is real hard on my back. I now have all I can put in my freezer so  she better get picking the rest of them as I want to take the cover down soon.

I spent some time putting the cover back together with staples just before dark and that was my day.

Nice day.

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