Wednesday January 11, 2017 Guerneville CA.
One more storm tonight
It wasn’t raining when I got up this morning. I knew the river was too high to really have an enjoyable paddle so I figured it wasn’t a good day to do that. But the heavy rain had stopped and there was only an occasional shower. One more rain storm coming in tonight and then we are supposed to get a break for a bit. I’m hoping the river stays down so I can get to my dentist tomorrow.
Going for a ride
So I was thinking it was a good day to have a look around and visit a few friends while I was at it.
I drove down the road to Ray’s to see how he faired as he lives by the creek. He said the creek had overflowed it’s banks last night and put six inches of water in his yard, but it didn’t get into anything as the rains finally slowed down last night.
He had already been to the river’s mouth and said the water was over the lower part of Penny Island this morning when he was down there.
I left Ray, taking it easy and headed on in to Guerneville and drove down this back street I always take to head down to Jenner. The road was flooded, so I had to detour around it.
This was the other end of that street, flooded for sure.
Monte Rio boat ramp
I continued down to Monte Rio going by several power company trucks working on getting their lines back up. Lots of wind blew a lot of stuff out of the big trees.
I drove over to the Monte Rio boat ramp area and it looked like the ducks owned it now, looking out to the view across the boat ramp which is thirty feet or so under water just past that pole. Easy to launch today. :O)
Lots of water going out the mouth
From there, I continued on down to the Jenner overlook to have a look at the river’s mouth. Lots of muddy water going out the mouth and into the ocean.
The harbor seals had moved up the beach a ways from were they normally hang out.
I drove to the Jenner boat ramp which looked like this. The river usually doesn’t flood much in the Jenner area, but the current picks up a bunch so one has to be careful. I wasn’t planning to put the boat in the water today.
On the way home on the road by the river. The river is up.
Helping Charlie fix his generator
I was thinking of visiting my friend Charlie in Monte Rio as he’d asked me about what might be wrong with his generator a few days ago and I was pretty sure he didn’t get it fixed.
I was pretty sure his carb bowl needed to be removed and cleaned out, so we took it off and sure enough it was full of rust and some jelled gas which was plugging up his jet. it showered on us a couple of times and all he had were a selection of old tools that made working on the generator a pain, but we keep at it. We had to get the jet out, but all his screw drivers where either too big or too small to get into the jet.
Here’s Charlie working on the generator between the rain showers. That’s my knee pad there.
I finally found a little piece of wire to push through the jet and we were able to push it into the jet and blow it out.
We put it all back together and I said to Charlie, start it up. He wasn’t sure it would work, but I was confident it would start and it did so Charlie was real happy.
The whole process would have been a lot easier and been done a lot sooner if he’d had some decent tools. He goes to garage sales a lot, so there’s no excuse for not having some decent tools and I told him so.
Safeway was fortunate
I left there and decided to get a few items at the local Safeway, but.
They’d already moved out all the veggies and all the freezer stuff including all the meats. They had been preparing to get flooded out, just in case, but they were fortunate and no water got into their store, but when it does, can you imagine the mess. All the food gets condemned when that happens.
I did find some mushrooms and some onions. When I got to the check out, they were all down except for the one at the service desk and there was a line, so I put my stuff back and said the heck with that.
Better than Safeway
I stopped at Ray’s brother John’s house to visit with him and his wife for a bit.
That was better than Safeway, as John is a hunter and fisherman, so he loaded me up with meat and rock fish from the ocean. Good deal, Thanks John.
Stopped by the gate
I drove on home from there and was going to go over to one of my neighbors and give him some advice on how to recover their hacked Facebook account, but the gate was locked so I couldn’t do that.
By this time it was getting dark so I went on in for the night and that was my day.