The sun was out and there was a light wind as I drove into Jenner this morning. I could see Ray’s’ truck in the parking lot, but I didn’t spot him in his yak. I put my boat in the water and headed down to the open river’s mouth as it was just coming off high tide.
This was my view as I paddled along the north edge of Penny Island just as I was about to clear the bottom end of it on the left, headed for the river’s mouth.
Lots of cormorants and seagulls resting on the sandy beach near the mouth.
I spotted Ray in his boat at the end of the river. See him on the far right.
As I paddled over by him, I went by these cormorants with the harbor seals behind them. There were lots of harbor seals resting here today, maybe a couple hundred of them.
What’s that?
It was so nice out, Ray and I sat at the end of the river for a couple hours or so before we headed up the river. On the way out, I spotted this thing up by the highway and was wondering what it might be as the biologists are always putting things out for me to try and figure out what they are. Shortly after seeing this Ray says they are measuring the jetty over there again. That explains it.
Mapping the jetty
We could see this guy walking with a walker pulling a little sled walking across where the buried jetty goes under the sand. It’s hard to see, but there are little antenna’s on his equipment that are likely sending data to the thing up on the hill or it is a repeater that picks up the data and sends it to a recorder somewhere?
Here’s another shot of the guy with the walker. The walker is likely some kind of device that thumps to send a signal down into the sand and is picked up by his sled so they can determine what is under the sand. At least that’s my best guess.
We continued on past them and headed on over to the back channel of Penny Island.
Here is our view as we headed on over there looking up the river, with Jenner on the left.
We passed these mergansers just as we came out of the island back channel.
We paddled on up to the Indian rock trailhead and went to shore for a little exploring.
The trail head is just up ahead a bit on the right.
Hike through the ferns
We walked through these big green ferns.
And by this big mushroom on a pepperwood tree trunk. It’s about eighteen inches across. I think they call them conks. The top of it is hard and it grows a little more each year from the bottom part that is white.
We walked by this big muskrat nest made of sticks. It’s about eight feet high.
We explored around there for about an hour, then got back in our boats and headed on back down the river.
Young Eagle
As we were paddling along an immature bald headed eagle flew over our heads from behind us and landed in a tree at eagle’s landing. But before I could spot it in one of the big trees, it flew off again and this was our view of it. It’s just starting to get it’s white head and white tail feathers.
We took our time paddling in as it was such a nice day. The sun was out, the wind was down and the temperature was perfect.
We took our boats out and went on home and that was it for a real nice day paddling around the Russian river estuary at Jenner.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
