Monday July 27, 2015 Jenner CA.
The weather was looking good as I put my boat in at Jenner this morning. There was an off shore breeze and the sun was mostly out. I paddled across the river to Penny Island when I saw Steve putting in his boat at the boat ramp so I waited for him to catch up.
When he caught up, we headed on up the river passing these white pelicans resting on the gravel beach just above Penny Island.
We continued on up the river and were by Eagle’s landing when the pelicans flew by heading up the river. They likely got spooked by some people and were heading up to a quieter spot.
We paddled up past Muskrat and on to Dead deer gulch and just a little further to this spot where I went to shore for a bit.
I’m sure I just saw a little frog hop up on that dead fish
Eventually we paddled back to Muskrat Nest beach and sat for awhile. As I was sitting there I thought I was seeing a frog hop up to this dead fish approaching in a circle from the left side. But as I stared at it, I thought,no, it was a mouse and took a couple pictures just before it flew off the fish in the wind.
See the little mouse on the right side of the dead fish? Steve was watching it too.
I wasn’t even sure it was a dead fish as I could barely see it. Here’s a little closer shot of the thing. It’s a fish alright.
It wasn’t a frog or a mouse after all
A little gust of wind came up and blew the little leaf away. That sure fooled us for a bit.
Dead harbor seal
We continued on down the river and went past this turkey vulture eating a dead harbor seal that died not too long ago.
Thousands of little fish
As we were paddling down the shoreline we began to see some sort of little fish splashing along the shoreline, lots of them. I stopped and a bunch of them swam around my boat.
See the little fish, about two inches long.
We paddled around the little fish for awhile watching them move in a big swarm.
A close up of the little fish. Since they are under the water, things look like this.
Diving brown pelican
Steve was going to go down to the river’s mouth area, but I was going in for the day, so I left him headed down the island back channel and I started crossing over the river to the boat ramp area when this brown pelican started diving for fish almost right in front of me. It jumped up and flew around and dove on fish several times as I watched. Here, it’s setting up it’s bill to swallow some fish it just caught which are in it’s pouch. It’s next move will be to point it’s bill to the sky and let the little fish slide down it’s hatch.
Here, the pelican is just about to do the same thing again. I never did see the little fish it was catching, but it seemed to be catching some on each dive.
From there, I headed over to the boat ramp and went on home for the day.
Van fan shroud construction project
I wanted to cut some new pieces out of the plastic barrel to start a new van fan shroud as I didn’t like the one I made yesterday.
I decided to try using the flat part of the barrel, so I cut one out, but found it a little floppy, so I decided to cut one out with a rib on it that would be out of the way of mounting it, so I cut out one like the one on the right which was much stiffer and should work better. But I got ahead of myself and tried to from an eighteen inch circle instead of the twenty inch one I needed and messed the first one up which you can see leaning against the barrel, cut up.
So, I cut the one out that is on the right in the above picture and decided to do more thinking and less cutting until I have it all figured out.
Here’s the new shroud laying on the template I will use to make it’s mounts. Now that I have a more uniform piece of plastic to make this out of, I should be able to just use this template. I should be able to build the whole shroud using the template and then just go mount it on the van without a bunch of adjustment, I hope.
I hope this one works
I decided to stop at this point for the day as I didn’t want to make anymore mistakes. If I think about what I need to do enough, I can just do it much faster and hopefully get it right. I need to get this one right as I’m getting tired of working on it. :O)
Nice day.
