Thursday July 3, 2014 Monte Rio CA.
Ray and I check out the paddle for our up coming reunion
One of my readers, Chuck from Monte Rio wanted to meet me, so I met him at the Monte Rio boat ramp this morning and had a chat. I told him, I thought Monte Rio had the most community orientated park on the river and no one else comes close. In my opinion, Monte Rio has run it’s parks on the river for the people that live there better than any others on the river. Jenner comes up second. The others don’t even come close.
Anyway, Ray showed up and we started on up the river to see how it was doing. Next week we have our elementary school reunion and most of us that attain will do this paddle for a lot of fun. I knew it was ok, with about the same amount of water as always, but any excuse is good enough to do this paddle as I consider it one of the nicest paddles on the river.
We put our boats in the water and immediately there is this shallow spot just below the Monte Rio bridge that we needed to paddle through. Only problem is it’s shallow and hard to put the paddle deep enough into the water to do much good. I used to paddle through it, until I got smart and now go to the gravel shore on the right, get out and pull my boat through the water to the upper end of it, just by the bridge. We did that and from there, there is enough water to paddle for quite a ways.
Just below the shallow spot, below the Monte Rio bridge as we started out today.
We worked our way slowly up the river, stopping often under trees for shade as it was warm today.
Just below Train Island, I spotted this green heron flying into this spot.
And just above Train island, I saw these two ravens on the shore line. I watched them for a bit and realized they were eating something. It turned out to be some kind of little snake, which was dead.
We continued on up the river. Lots of big trees along the banks in this spot, up near the Northwood Golf course.
Just above that spot, the river turns going around the golf course which makes for a real scenic area. We sat over in the back there for a spell, before continuing on.
Going up the little channel past the first turn, we passed over these fish tracking pipes under the water. Fish that have been tagged with passive type tags that last a life time are recorded when they pass over these pipes. The biologists have these fish trackers at a number of spots on the river and I think in some of the creeks too.
As we continued on, I spotted this female wood duck moving along the shoreline, with her two little ones following close behind her. The little ones are hard to see as they blind in well, but there are two of them behind her. Most wood ducks, you can’t get this close to, but Monte Rio is a special place for wild birds. That’s not the last we saw of her and her little ones.
I sat under the trees at this spot and had some lunch.
We paddled on up going through this spot, before we came to some shallows were we’d have to get out of our boats to get by.
At that point we turned around and decided that would be far enough for our reunion class, unless they had a bunch more energy than we did.
We were sitting under some trees and as we left, two more kayaks came down the river when I noticed the momma duck with the two little ones had gotten stuck between them and us. She would normally fly off to distract us from the little ones, but it was too late for that. The little ones can’t fly yet. She hurried along.
I’m sure she was relieved to get out of the middle of that, as she and her little ones headed for the bushes on the shoreline.
I was curious if the orange thing was still up in the Clar tree, one of the biggest redwood trees around with about a twenty four foot diameter, old too, over a thousand years. It’s close to the river, but hard to see from the spot where we were, but Ray finally spotted it. The orange thing was still up there.
The big tree with the unknown orange thing in it.
As we started on down the river from there I went past the wood ducks taking it easy on a branch in the bushes.
Here is a close up of the two little wood ducks. Wood ducks seem to mostly have two little ones around here. And they are good parents as most of the little ones seem to survive.
It was fairly warm today and I was getting tired. I should have jumped in the river, but just never made it for some reason.
As we were floating down, Ray says there’s some baby swallows on the bushes being fed by the parents.
Apparently, these are baby swallows that have just left the safety of the nests and are being fed and taught how to survive. We saw quite a few of them in the bushes along the shoreline in this area.
As we approached Monte Rio, we started running into more people out enjoying the river on this holiday.
Some mallard ducks sharing the water with a swimmer. A light breeze has come up.
We had a nice paddle, but boy was I tired out for some reason, must be my age and the sun?
We took our boats out of the water at the boat ramp and went on home for the day, around four PM I think it was.
When I got home, I was beat and just napped around until almost dark, when I went out into the yard and sat around and enjoyed the evening until just after dark.
That was my day.