Monday, Feb. 4, 2013, Jenner, CA.
I woke up to thump-pity, thump, thump-pity, this morning.
Little paws on my deck, two little feral kitties running around on it just after it got light. That’s way too early for me. They’ve been doing this for the last week or so and it’s messing with my sleep.
I’m going to have to get up when I hear this and go give them a good scare and see if they’ll go some place else and do that. Now, if only I can get out of bed and do that? :O)
Looks like it’s going to be a cloudy and foggy day.
When I did finally get up around ten this morning, it was cloudy and foggy out there. I got going and headed for Jenner to Kayak today, fog or no.
Ray’s truck was in the parking lot, but I didn’t’ see him anywhere. I got my boat in the water and yes, it was fairly foggy down there too, and the light breeze was a bit on the chilly side. I headed across to the island and went down it’s shore line toward the west end.
I could see Ray approaching down the island channel.
From the west end I could see up the far side channel and saw Ray headed my way, so I went over to the slot and waited for him to work his way down.
The river water was a bit higher today for some reason.
When he arrived, we decided to continue on down to the mouth. The estuary water was a bit higher today and maybe the mouth of the river was closed which would cause that and I wanted to see if it was closed or not.
So, that’s what we did, just kept paddling leisurely down toward the mouth of the river. We did note that there weren’t many seals or sea lions in the water today fishing, so maybe the mouth was closed?
Nope, the river’s mouth was not closed as we thought.
Well, when we got to the river’s mouth, we found we were wrong and the mouth was open, but the rough ocean had pushed a lot of sand into the mouth area this last week, which caused the sand in the river’s mouth to be higher, which caused the estuary water to rise a couple more feet than it was, a week ago.
We put ashore to look around.
Ray wanted to get out and stretch, so we put ashore right at the top of the river’s mouth on the north shore. There was a lot of draft wood on the breach which is always a good time to look around to see what one can find. We looked around, and found some stuff, but nothing worth keeping.
Below, is where we put ashore. This is on the top of the river’s mouth, looking out to the Pacific ocean. The ocean is at low tide at this time and still a bit on the rough side.
We walked a bit closer to the ocean and I took the below photo of the river going into the Pacific ocean.
Happy seals at the river’s mouth.
There were a bunch of harbor seals taking it easy on the opposite side of the river channel, as you can see below, life is good.
Not much steelhead action today.
There were a few harbor seals in the water and a couple of sea lions fishing. Things have slowed down a bit from last week, as far as the numbers of steelhead coming into the river, as far as I can gage from the lack of hunting activity. There is some hunting, but not any where close to the activity of last week.
I think we were at the river’s mouth for about an hour standing around getting chilled by the light breeze that was blowing in off the ocean. We got back in our boats and headed back up through the backside Penny Island channel, taking our time.
John, the trash man paddled up to us.
John the trash guy came up behind me while we were sitting in the slot area. John lives down there right near the mouth and he spends a lot of his time picking up thrash items that float down the river. He does a good job of it, I think he mostly does it for the exercise. That’s a never ending job. I’m glad someone does it.
Penny Island east end channel.
We worked our way up to the little channel on the east end of the island that is almost always out of the wind. After spending some time there, Ray decided to call it a day and went in. I stayed and eventually decided to put ashore there to look around a bit.
Below, is the little channel on the east end of the island, where I put my boat ashore to have a look around. This is looking back toward the visitor’s center.
A floor mat for my van mud guard.
While looking around, I spotted this rubbery looking thing, about two feet, by two feet, by a half inch. A piece of floor matting. Would this work for my mud guard for my under the van propane tank? Was it tough enough. It wasn’t as tough as a big truck mud flap, but it just might do, so I picked it up and took it home.
I’d rather have rubber than steel sheet metal for the guard for two reasons. One, rocks and sticks would be less likely to knock it off and two, if I hit the metal one with my head while working under the van, it wouldn’t be good, so it would be much better with a rubbery material, so I’ll cut this out and see how it works out. The river gives, if one only waits.
I was rather chilled by this time, so I followed Ray’s lead and paddled over to the visitor’s center take out. Went home, started the heating stove, sat in my chair and that’s all that got done, until it got dark, when I started dinner.
Had a cool, but nice day on the river.