Friday January 9, 2015 Jenner CA.
It was cool with a light wind when I arrived at Jenner and put my boat in the water. Ray showed up with his boat just as I got into my boat. We headed across and on up the river taking our time as usual.
It was a bit chilly and I was hoping the sun would come out and the wind would settle down and it finally did as can be seen in this photo as we headed up to the Muskrat nest beach where we were hoping to get out and go for a little walk.
We spied this bird up ahead sitting on a rock. It’s turned out to be a seagull. As we approached it, it didn’t take off like it should. It looks like it has a broken right wing. It slipped into the water after we passed and swam off. Not a good thing for a bird.
Muskrat is too muddy
As we approached Muskrat and tried to land here, it turned out to be too muddy for our liking, so we didn’t land.There is a big muskrat nest to the middle right of the picture. Click the picture to enlarge and get a much better quality picture.
Well if we couldn’t go ashore at this end of the trail, maybe we could at the other end, or in the middle as it turns out.
Eagle’s landing worked out
We put ashore here at Eagle’s landing and headed back up the river.
We were trying to follow the poison oak alley trail which goes along the shoreline. It’s an overgrown deer trail that the deer and other animals use. They can go under the brush better than we, so the going is rough, except when it pops out under the trees. The trees retard the undergrowth, so there isn’t much brush under them and the trail is better.
The trail goes through quite a lot of different microclimates, so it’s rather interesting.
Here we are going through these grasses on a fairly good part of the trail. Lots of poison oak mixed in and it’s dormant so there are no leaves on the plant. Ray and I don’t catch the stuff, so we were ok with it.
Here, I am following Ray as he checks something out up in the bushes. It’s the first time Ray has been on this trail. I was on it a few years ago.
We passed by quite a few muskrat nests along the way.This is a big one with the dead ferns on it.
It’s hard work to walk this trail
I think we might have made it up the trail about a quarter of a mile or so before tiring out and turning back.
Here, you can see Ray going under some tree limbs. The deer are better at this than we are. I don’t think they get as pooped out as we do either.
Ray spots the eagle
We were moving along as Ray says there’s a bald eagle across the river from us. Sure enough, there was. It looked like it was just taking it easy.
It flew off as we watched, down the river and out of sight.
We are almost back to our boats in this picture as Ray looks at another deer trail going up the hill that we use to go up to lookout point on occasion.
Our boats were still there when we got back to eagle’s landing which is always a nice thing.
We put our boats in the water and started on in for the day. These cormorants were across the river from us doing what cormorants do.
There weren’t too many birds about today, but we did pass by these two female merganser ducks sitting on an old redwood log.
This was our view west as we crossed back over the river to the boat ramp, just a bit before the sun headed down for the day. We could hear the ocean pounding on the beach down that way.
We pulled our boats out and went on home for the day. I fell asleep in my chair as it was a lot of exercise doing that walk and I was pooped.
Nice day though.