Tuesday December 10, 2013 Jenner CA.
Showing Ray the Swamp Rock Area
When I arrived at Jenner this morning I could see Ray was already in his boat and over by Penny Island taking it easy.
I put my boat in the water and went over to join him. It was low tide, meaning the mouth was open and the sun was out, luckily. Still a bit on the crispy side. A light breeze, but not too bad. Diffidently a day to stay in the sun.
We started up the river at our normal leisurely pace. Ray said he’d like to go for a little hike today. I had just the place. Just past the east end of Penny Island where I had been exploring trails a few days before, the swamp rock area. Of course it was a poison oak area, but Ray and I don’t catch the stuff too easily.
We put our boats in here and started our hike.
We walked across the swamp area on the right of the picture below to get to swamp rock which is just up the hill a little so the view is better. This is looking across to the town of Jenner. 
We stayed up there for a bit, it’s only draw back is the sun wasn’t shinning on the rock, it was behind the hill, so the chill overtook us after a bit, so we hiked back down and got in the sun again.
I showed Ray the little pond in the swamp area, which still had a little water in it. It will fill up when the rains come. Notice the high swamp grass we hiked though to get here.
After that we were headed back to the boats, but at the last minute, I said, lets hike up the river on this trail to Eagle’s landing as long as we are here. So we did, it’s about a half mile up the river.
Just before we got to Eagle’s landing I took this photo looking back to Jenner, down river.
We made it to eagle’s landing and sat around a bit for a break, but the sun was behind the hill here too, so we soon left to go back down the river on the trail.
Here’s Ray walking down the trail.
And though a lot of brush.
We climbed back in to our boats and headed down the river, down the back channel of Penny Island. Now with the tide so low, we might not make it down the back channel and almost didn’t. We scraped gravel and bit but made it though, just barely, headed for the west end of Penny Island.
There were a lot of seagulls and a few turkey vultures on the west end of Penny Island.
Here you can see some of the seagulls there, looking back towards Jenner.
Lots of seagulls bunched together here, mostly resting and preening a bit.
Some vultures were also there eating some little thing they found on the shore at low tide.
We continued down towards the river’s mouth, under a light breeze.
Lot’s of seagulls and seals on the beach in the mouth area, below.
The river’s mouth is still wide open.
There were a few seals in the water swimming around us.
There were also three sea lions hunting just inside the mouth which were too fast for me to get any good pictures.
The day was starting to cool down as the sun was headed down, so we headed back in for the day.
This is our view just before we turned to go in for the day.
Sea lions in the estuary are a good indicator that there are some big fish coming into the river to spawn. I’ve had reports that some salmon are still coming in and a few steelhead too from fishermen up river.
Even though the rest of the country is freezing their butts off, the sun was out nice here and we had a real nice day on the river at Jenner.
