Friday August 2, 2013 Jenner, CA.
Phyto Phosphorous Plankton
Yesterday I was looking at the tides. The high tide for today was just before dark, which is real good to bring the plankton into the river just before dark. It rides in, in the salt water, when the salt water comes into the river during high tides. The higher the high tide the better.
Anyway, tonight looked real favorable, as it was a 5.7 foot tide which is fairly high for here. If I remember right, high tide was eight thirty PM.
I started out the day checking on new tires for my van. I’m going to get a full set even though the ones on there are still fairly, good. They have seen over a dozen desert trips and are a getting a little old. They’ve been a lot of other places too. I’ll likely order those soon.
Then I did some visiting in Santa Rosa for most of the day and came home and fixed some dinner and headed for Jenner around seven thirty.I had tipped Steve off on the possible good lumen night and was surprised to find him down at Jenner. I actually found his car there and had no idea where he was on the river, but figured I’d run into him eventually when it got dark.
There was very little wind when I got there, more a light breeze. I put my boat in the water and headed across to Penny island. Decided to go up stream a little ways first as I wanted to be down by the river’s mouth for dark, to check for lumens there, even though I know there are likely too much light coming from the River’s End Restaurant, so I’d head back down that way later.
This is what the river looked like just after I got there, looking up river as I’m crossing over to Penny Island.
I ran into Steve at Otter’s log. From that point we started heading back down the river towards the mouth. I wanted to check out the seals that hang out in the water at the west end of Penny island too.
As we headed down that way, the sun was sinking fast.
Sun is on it’s way down in the picture below. The river has flattened out some more and the wind has almost died to nothing. A real nice evening.
The sun went on down and it just got nicer.
And nicer.
We ran into the seals at the west of Penny Island. Here’s a shot of some of them. They get real curious, watching you back.
I went on down to the river’s mouth where I sat around until it got darker.
This is the view I had out the river’s mouth into the Pacific ocean, just before dark.
The sun was pretty much down by now and the water was mostly glass
It’s hard waiting for it to get dark enough and there is a lot of light from houses and the restaurant that mess up the lumens in that area, so we started to head back up the south side of the river. We started to pick up some pretty good lumens when we got up near the west end of Penny island on the south side of the river.This area is always good. We didn’t find many fish in this area though, so we moved on up the back channel of the island where we hit lumens on and off and lots of little fish started to be seen darting under the water and glowing from the plankton.
We checked out the little channel on the east end of Penny island which barely had enough water to get though. No lumens in there as it was all fresh river water, no salt.
From there we headed up river again crossing over to the south shore line again where we picked up lots of lumens and more little fish. We worked our way all the way up the eagle’s landing area, about a half mile up the river where we saw lots of lumens and little fish glowing.
We then crossed over to the north side of the river and headed back down toward the visitors center. We ran into a lot of lumens on that side too with a lot of fish. As we headed on down the lumens started to disappear because the tide was going out and fresh river water was replacing the ocean salt water from the high tide.
The lights coming in were clearer than what I show in the below picture, but this is the best I could do in the night from a moving kayak. The visitor’s center launch ramp is in the lights somewhere?
I’d say we had a fairly super night for the lumens. We saw quite a few fish glowing too. I’ve seen better fish nights, but there were still a lot of fish this time out, as compared to some other times when there are only a few fish. Most of these fish are small, like maybe three to six inches in length as near as I can tell.
A successful night out looking for lumens.
Had a good day and night too.