Monday October 27, 2014 Jenner CA.
When I arrived at Jenner today, Ray and his brother, John, with his left arm in a sling were at the ramp and ready to go, so I got my boat in the water too. They wanted to go down to the mouth to check it out, so off we went.
The water was flat, no wind, as we made our way down the north shoreline.
Our view as we headed on over to the closed river mouth. Nice.
We passed by a bunch of seagulls with a few brown pelicans mixed in too.
And a group of grebe. There seems to be more of these grebe this year, than in previous years I’ve been watching them. They arrive in the fall and stay most of the winter.
The river mouth is closed up pretty good now
The river’s mouth is closed up with sand, so the process of the rising water starts all over again. Note that the higher high tides can still get over the sand, especially if the ocean gets rough, which it does a lot this time of year.
We sat around down there in front of the closed mouth for about an hour shooting the bull. John’s especially good at that. :O)
While we were there, Ray was eating some chicken wings and I ate an apple. This seagull came by and was interested in Ray’s discarded bones, but not interested in my apple core. The wind was starting to pick up which can be seen in the seagulls blown feathers.
A walk on Penny Island
Eventually, we headed for the back channel of Penny Island where it was decided we’d go ashore on the west end for a bit of a walk, at this point.
Can we walk around the island
We decided to try to walk around the island if we could. The island is real brushy and the trails are overgrown with lots of things to step over and under and around which makes for lots of exercise, for us older folk, which is good for us, just the same.
Here, I’m waiting for the younger guys to catch up with me.
We made it to the east end of the island where the houses and barns were located.
Here is Ray, as we went through the bigger trees and started down the other side, to head on back.
To get back, we needed to cross over the middle, back to the trail, but at this point we ran into some water still in the swamp from when the water was high a couple days ago from the closed river’s mouth. The big tree you see is back at the homestead, which we now needed to return to, to get back on a trail that would take us back to our boats, which is actually on the island behind us in this picture.
I’m waiting again for the younger guys under the big tree in the above picture. There are vines climbing up the big tree. The vines are mattress vines or wire vines. They are very strong and would also likely make good basket making material, that the Indians who lived on the island might have used for this purpose? The vines also have a rather herbal aroma, which filled our nostrils as we passed.. 
Town of Jenner
Our view of the town of Jenner from the island, just after we passed out from the big tree. The big tree is also where the main house on the island is located.
I’m waiting for the younger guys to catch up by the old milk barn. The big trees here are eucalyptus trees and are very wind blown.
Now that we made it back to the east end of the island, we could retrace the trail back to the west end where our boats were.
We passed several spotted orb weaver spiders along the trail. The wind had picked up a lot, so the spiders were really moving around a lot and hard to get a picture that wasn’t all blurred out.
Detoured to another trail
Instead of going straight back to the boats, we detoured off on another trail and came out in this spot near the west end of the island. A few days ago we paddled into this spot when the island was flooded because of the closed river mouth. Much easier to walk in this spot and we were hoping we wouldn’t run into some more water that we couldn’t get through. We didn’t.
We arrived back in this spot which completed our loop. The island is about a mile or so long, so with our back track, because of the water, we walked about two and a half miles.
That’s a hard two and a half miles. Climbing over, under and around stuff really tires us out, but we did get a lot of good exercise.
We arrived back at our boats. By now the wind was really blowing around twenty five miles an hour. Still do able in kayaks as they are low in the water.
We put our boats back in the water and let the wind carry us up the island’s back channel to the east of the island and crossed over the little channel there and headed on over to the boat ramp..
Not many people like to boat in the wind, so we had the place to ourselves and the boat ramp too. :O) Lucky for me, Ray and John can handle the wind, some people can’t handle it.
We had a nice day kayaking and walking around exploring Penny island.
I went on home and all I could do was hit the couch for the rest of the day.
Not a bad day for a bunch of retired older folk. :O)