Monday September 7, 2015 Guerneville CA.
I decided to stay home again today and just putter around. I did a few things in the yard, then hopped on my quad runner for a ride up into the redwood forest to check on the water springs and just enjoy the ride.
I stopped and checked the water tanks. The gage said they were full, so that indicated most of the system must be working ok, so I didn’t need to check some of things I normally check. I did go by the individual springs and found the wild pigs had pulled one of the pipes apart for a spot to take a mud bath.
Going on up the hill, right away I ran into this tree across the road. I was able to get over the end of this one, but there were others where I had to turn around and go another way.
A ride up the hill gets me to the top of the ridge where I can overlook the town of Guerneville. Most of the town of Guerneville is behind the green field which is a field of Korbel’s grapes, a local winery.
I rode around the hills a bit checking out the condition of the road, noting some dead trees down and a few dirt slides too that need to be taken care of.
I stopped to check on another spring here on the way down the hill. Everything looked good here as far as the spring stuff and the forest too.
Back home, I took it easy for the rest of the day, resting up for an evening of kayaking at Jenner.
Kayaking in the evening at Jenner
I was thinking I’d go down in the evening and stay until after dark to check out the lumens as high tide was coming into the river just before dark.
I arrived around six PM and put my boat in the water and headed across to Penny Island where I spotted this great blue heron fishing along the shoreline. It was catching some kind of really small fish, about an inch in length.
And not far from the heron this egret was also fishing for the same kind of fish.
As I was watching, the great heron flew into the air and headed for the egret screeching causing the egret to jump into the air also screeching. They flew off sorta chasing one another and landed across the river and seemed to settle down fishing again.
I paddled up the north side of the river looking for birds along the shoreline. Just below Paddy’s rock, I ran into these ducks that looked like they were there for the night. Some mallards and some merganser ducks. They all had their eyes on me as I passed.
I crossed over to the south side of the river and started heading on down as the sun seemed to be going down.
I paddled along here heading down the river toward the setting sun.
Old milk barn
I passed by the old milk barn on Penny Island which looked like this.
As I neared the lower end of Penny Island these ducks swam by preening and making some splashes in the water as they went.
As I cleared the lower end of Penny Island the sun was starting to set behind some trees and the wind was down tonight too.
I headed on down towards the open river’s mouth moving the setting sun to a new position.
As I got closer to the open mouth, the sun got smaller as it sank way out in the ocean.
Wait for dark
I needed to wait until it got dark so I headed on down to the end of the river by Haystack rock here and sat for a good while just after sunset.
I always have a hard time sitting and waiting for it to get dark enough to see the lumens in the water. I stayed there until just before dark and headed on up the river at a very slow pace. I could see the holiday lights on at most of the Jenner houses was going to wash out most of the lumens tonight. I headed over to the back channel of Penny Island to try and get out of some of the light.
About this time I realized I didn’t have a light and would just have to do without one. Most of the time a light is not needed so I was ok with that and if something went splash in the night, I just wouldn’t be able to see it, but usually things that go splash in the night disappear too fast to know what they are anyway.
Here’s my view of some of the Jenner lights reflecting in the river water. Too many of these lights and the lumens don’t show up in the water. It has to be dark enough.
Not a good night for lumens
I saw a few sparkles in the water from my paddle as I started up the back channel. I could see the tide had changed by the time it got dark enough and most of the ocean water with the lumens in it had gone back out of the river.
I decided to at least paddle up to the otter’s log area as there are usually more lumens there which I did. But it turned out to be the same, too much light from Jenner and the tide was now wrong, so I headed back down the river from there and went in for the night.
I only saw a few sparkles tonight because of too much light and a tide that was too early. However, it was a very nice evening and night paddle just the same.
