Friday November 13, 2015 Jenner CA.
Another sunny and low wind day at Jenner as I arrived this morning. It was a bit cool, but not bad for a fall day. I put my boat in the water and was just heading out when Ray pulled onto the boat ramp and unloaded his boat, so I waited for him.
We paddled across the river to Penny Island and decided to head on down to the river’s mouth as it was just coming to high tide, so water should be breaking over the somewhat closed river’s mouth.
There were lots of big waves breaking over the jetty as we approached the mouth area.
We were sitting there in my spot watching these harbor seals walking over the sand to the ocean.
Sea lion
Ray says he thinks he sees a big sea lion to the left of the seals so I take a look and this is what I see.
Finally the sea lion pops up to have a look around and we watch as it makes it’s way across the sand to the ocean taking it’s time.
We watch as it seems to disappear by the big rocks. A bit later Ray says the sea lion is still by the big rocks. I look and sure enough the sea lion has found a spot just behind a big rock where it was sitting on the sand as the big waves were breaking over the rocks. When the water went out between waves, it appeared it was just laying in wait behind the rock for fish to come to it. That’s what it looked like to us. It stayed there as we left the area.
That’s what the sea lion looked like to us as waves would beak over the rocks which surprisingly didn’t move the big animal off the sand.
As we paddled away from the mouth area and across the water to Penny Island we went by a bunch of seagulls washing, resting and preening.
We headed up the back channel behind Penny Island where we saw a couple turkey vultures resting on some big redwood stumps. Here’s one of the vultures.
Going up the back channel we noticed a number of harbor seals swimming around and a big flock of cormorants and some great blue herons in the area. I rarely see seals in the back channel so I knew something was up. Apparently there was a big school of little fish in the area that they were all ganging up on and fishing away.
Here’s just a few of the cormorants that were fishing.
We left them all fishing away and continued on up the river. We could hear a lot of splashing back there where they were fishing as we went.
River otters
Ray says did you hear that? I said yes, I think there are some otters over there and we could hear them grunting as they do. As we paddled a bit closer this one jumped out of the water and up on this rock for a short time before it dove back in the water.
Indian Rock trailhead
They disappeared and we continued on up the river to the Indian Rock Trailhead as
Ray wanted to hike up to the big rock. We landed on a steep rocky shoreline. I was watching Ray as his boat moved off the rocks just a little as he was standing up. I thought he was going in the water, but he got a foot out of the boat and on the shore, but then he slipped and somehow just barely landed sitting down in his boat, just getting a little wet. I thought it was a good save and was surprised he didn’t land in the water. Needless to say, I was a lot more careful and we made it to shore and tied up our boats to make sure they’d be there when we got back.
We headed straight up the hill using an old animal trail. We could hear a lot of cows mooing as we went up the hill and were wondering what’s that about. As we got higher on the hill we could look out and see that the cows just got fed and were chowing down in the field below us.
We made it up to the rock where there was a cool breeze so we didn’t think we’d stay long and started down off the rock, but on the way down we found a nice notch in the rock where we could sit out of the wind and in the sunny sun. The spot was so nice we stayed there for quite some time just enjoying ourselves.
When we left the rock, we headed down another trail that goes through the trees. The brush is a lot less under the trees and is easier to walk.
When we got near the bottom we decided to try another way and ended up here in the bushes, not too far from our boats. There’s lots of poison oak in this area. Ray and I don’t catch the stuff, fortunately.
We were careful getting back in our boats and then crossed over the river to the Paddy’s rock area looking for birds along the way.
Not too many birds in this area today, I think most of them were still out fishing.
We did go by this great blue heron sitting along the bank on the way in.
We pulled into the boat ramp, Ray got his boat loaded, but I ran into Patrick, a local guy, so we had to shoot the bull for a bit about the goings on around Jenner. Patrick dives a lot and takes underwater pictures, but I haven’t seen any of his stuff yet.
I loaded my boat on the car and went on home for the day. The day was cool when I got home, so I decided to stay in the house and that was my day.