Birds and Seals Paddling with Ray and Steve in the Estuary

Thursday October 30, 2014 Jenner CA.

I could see Ray and Steve at the boat ramp as I drove into the parking lot at the Jenner visitor center this morning. They waited for me to get my boat in the water and we headed on over to Penny Island where it was decided we’d go down and check out the river’s mouth.

As we were going down the side of Penny Island Ray suddenly turned and said Bobcat. I didn’t see it right away, but when I did, it was too close and it turned and disappeared in the weeds and was gone.

Just past that, we ran into some cormorants diving and fishing in a big group, as they headed away from us.

Continuing on, we passed a bunch of seagulls with some brown pelicans mixed in. Here’s one of the pelicans preening.

We could see that the river’s mouth was closed up with sand, real solid.

We sat in front of the closed mouth for quite awhile and just watched. This harbor seal approached the closed mouth and proceeded to scamper over the sand to get to the ocean.

Eventually, we headed on out, towards Penny Island. The river was nice and flat with very little wind as we took off, looking up the river towards the island.

I was taking a picture of this big redwood tree stump when I noticed a bird in the green pine tree behind it.

Ray was checking it out just to my right so I went over to get a closer picture of it. Ray said, maybe a kite, or something like that?

We decided to go ashore at Penny island for a short walk, which we did here on the east end.

This is what’s left of the old barn on the island.

We walked around on the island a bit looking for spotted orb spiders. We found one of them, but it wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to get a clear picture of it.

Just before we got back to our boats, this was our view off the east end of the island, looking up river.

Ray headed on in for the day and Steve and I headed on up the river on the south shore line.

We pasted these two harbor seals and the cormorant.

A closer look at one of the harbor seals, as we scooted on by it.

We took our time and paddled on up to Muskrat Nest beach where we sat around until we decided to head back in for the day.

Here we are going past eagle’s landing.

As we were paddling we saw this grebe dive just in front of us, not knowing where it would pop up after the dive. It turned out, it popped up a couple feet right in front of me.