A Pie, A Paddle, an Osprey Fly’s, Moss, and Rotation the Van Tires

Thursday June 23, 2016 Monte Rio CA.

Day starts with a blueberry pie From Dominique’s Sweets

This morning as I went out to my car to head out to kayak for the day I was surprised with this blueberry pie Dominique made for me. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Needless to say a piece of pie was in order. Yummmmm again. :O)

Kayaking Monte Rio

After that I headed out and decided to kayak Monte Rio today as with the river’s mouth closed down at Jenner, the water level at Monte Rio is up which changes the river a bit and makes it more like a lake as it not only rises the level of the river, but it also stills it so the moss can grow better.

Because of the higher water level, it’s a good time to go up the river as all the shallows are gone and it’s easier to paddled up the river, but I decided to go down river instead.

This family of mallards swam over to my boat just as I got in the water. A momma and her four little ones.

As I was paddling along, I could see a lone turtle up ahead on the left side of the river, so I veered over that way. The turtle looked a little weird and as I got closer I could see there was some moss growing on it’ shell.

Villa Grande Hole

I’m not going far today, just down to the Villa Grande Hole, just up ahead. See the osprey nest just in front of my bow on the right.

What are the osprey doing

I moved into the Villa Grande area and sat and watched and the osprey got my attention. There were three of them there. One was doing this.

A bit later I noticed this one just hovering about six feet over the nest, then landing on the nest and doing it again. A ha, a little guy practicing to fly, I thought.

Shortly after that it took off and flew a short distance around the Villa Grande Hole where I was sitting and then flew back to the nest. It repeated that for a bit while I watched staying out for a bit longer each time.

Can’t do the power dive yet

As I watched I could see the bird start a power dive more then once, but as soon as it started, it pulled pulled out, not completing or hardly even starting the dive. I’d think it would take a lot of skill and confidence to do one of their power dives for the first time. It never got past the start while I watched.

Sometimes a parent would come over to fly with it chirping all the time.

Eventually, it went back to the nest for a break.

I headed up the river at a slow pace stopping here and there along the way.

Here’s one of the places I stopped.

These little mallard ducks were sneaking by me not really too concerned with me.

Let’s talk moss

Most people seem to have weird ideas about moss as far as I can see. They think it’s bad stuff, but it’s just another plant. When conditions get right, it grows and I hear people hollering about something’s polluting the river and causing the nasty moss to grow.

I’d be more concerned if it didn’t grow which would really mean something is wrong and very polluted. Moss likes to grow in warmer water. It especially grows well when water is still such as in a pond.

But hey wait, the mouth is closed and is in effect just a big pond with mostly stilled water that is warming up because the suns out and the water is still. And to top that,this pond is getting deeper each day the mouth is closed, so guess what, the moss gets to grow long and thick.

Now that’s not the end of it. Once the mouth is opened up the estuary water drops very fast and guess what again? If you drop six feet of water to one foot of water, the moss is now very thick and something must be wrong. Now if the wind was to happen to come up, it will blow the moss into heaps and now there must be something even more wrong with the river as now there’s all this horrid moss on the beaches and piled up in the water.

In my younger days I swam in ponds

In my younger days, around the time of age 24 or so, I spent some time working on a ranch installing miles of fence on hot days. After work, or sometimes at lunch time, we’d head for the pond. Sometimes we’d have to move the moss out of the way as we entered the nice water to get into the deeper part. But you know, that moss never did us any harm and it sure was nice to go for a swim after a hard days work in the sun.

Anyway, I suspect we’ll be hearing about the bad moss on the river soon.

Monte Rio’s friendly birds

I paddled on and ran into these resting ducks just below Monte Rio. Monte Rio has the friendliest ducks and wild birds of just about any place I’ve paddled which means the birds and people are getting along well together.

This was my view as I came up on Monte Rio with their bridge in the background.

Rotating the van tires at Country Tire in Guerneville

I cut it a little short today as I wanted to take my van to the tire guys and have them rotate my tires as the front ones were starting to cup a little as four wheel drive tires do.

But when I got home, I needed a nap so I hit the couch until I was ready to call
The local tire shop, Country Tire. One of the nice things about using a local tire shop is I can just call in the afternoon and go down and get things done. I called and they said to come right down, so I did. See that’s why I took the nap first.

Anyway, I pulled in and Sue greeted me and set me up for my free rotation. Mark and Sue are a local family that runs this place. Mark and another guy were working on my van before we even got the paperwork taken care of and I was out of there in about a half hour with no fuss. Actually the only paper work we did was Sue entered some stuff in her computer while I answered a couple questions.

I couldn’t really give Sue any good info as just after we installed those tires, my speedometer died and I replaced it with a new one that started at zero miles and I didn’t record what the old one said, so I was just guessing that the tires needed rotated. The new speedometer read something like 4,235 miles, so that’s about right for a rotation, but to complicate that, my speedo is off about thirteen miles slow. But the tires were starting to cup a little so that meant it was time to rotate.

Anyway, here’s the old van with it ‘s tires off in the Country Tire shop. Tubes for sale for the river of course.

Off to Boonville

Like I said I was out of there in a short time. I stopped to fuel up on the way home as I’m taking off on a short trip tomorrow.

I’m headed to Boonville at my friend Marty’s cabin for a few days. We plan to cut a few trees down for fire wood and mostly take it easy up there.

There’s no internet service up there, so I won’t likely post until Monday when I return.

Nice day on the river.