Geese Kayaking Jenner

Friday January 24, 2014 Jenner CA.

Looked like another nice day when I woke up so I headed down to Jenner to kayak for the day.

I put my boat in the water and paddled across to Penny island where I sat for a bit. It was a bit breezy with a chill in the air, but the sun was out, so I was hoping it would improve just a bit. The ocean was real rough and was pounding big time on the beaches.

While I was sitting over there I saw Ray’s truck pull into the parking lot, so I waited for him to catch up.

We decided to go on up to Willow Creek, so we headed up the river, but as we were going up there the wind picked up just a bit. When we got to Eagle’s landing, we felt real lazy so decided not to go up to Willow creek, but just lazily work our way up the river a bit past eagle’s landing, which we did.

Ray wanted to go for a walk somewhere, but with the water level so high, it was hard to find a place to get out of the boats. We headed back down the river and were going to see if we could still get out of our boats on the east end of Penny Island.

It was warming up a bit by now, but there was still a good breeze.

This is what the river looked like as we headed for Penny Island.

We heard several shotgun shots just up river and all the geese up that way took to the air and some of them passed us as they headed down river to a saver area.

There wasn’t much room to get out of our boats on the east end of Penny Island, but we just made it. Here is where we landed to go for a little walk.

Headed for the old milk barn on Penny Island.

We found the trail on the north side and did our best to hike down it.

There are lots of willow trees to cross on the trail. The scarred part on that willow tree is from a Bobcat. They mark a lot of trees on the island by scratching them.

Here’s Ray coming up behind me on the trail. It’s thick stuff on Penny Island and one has to really work at it to find their way around.

After the island walk we got back in our boats and headed on down to the west end of Penny Island where we paddled onto the flooded part.

The wind had really died down while we were walking on the island, which was nice.

A lot of the geese had landed on the flooded Penny Island when they left the area where the shots where fired earlier.

Here are some of them as we entered the flooded part of the island.

Another pic of the geese.

They were a bit skittish from the earlier shooting and took flight and flew off.

We paddled onto the island and sat around there for a bit.

This is the view as we paddled onto the island.

After awhile Ray decided to go in for the day so I left him and went down to the closed river’s mouth.

The ocean was real rough, but the high tide wasn’t that high, so waves weren’t coming into the river as I watched, but they likely would during the higher high tide at night.

A picture of the river’s mouth area, with the ocean waves breaking over the jetty and rocks.

I was thinking of hanging around until sunset, but I was also getting hungry, so headed on back for the day.

I checked the water level gauge at the visitor center. It’s reading just over seven feet, so that should signal it’s time to open the river’s mouth, which I would guess would be Tuesday as they usually post a notice on the visitor center the day before which should be Monday, but who knows, they might open it Monday, we’ll see.