Tuesday July 22, 2014 Jenner CA.
The days plan
The plan for the day was to putter around the house and yard and then go down to Jenner for an evening and night kayak to see if we could see any lumens?
I started the day off with some shopping and banking and then came home and made some bread dough and left it to rise.
Moved some mulch
After that, I went out in the yard and raked and moved some leaves for mulch onto some very young apricot trees.
Raking leaves here and hauling them to some small fruit trees for mulch.
I puttered around the yard until about five, then got something to eat and had a little nap.
Off to see the lumens
At about six PM, I drove my car down to Jenner and put my boat in the water. Ray was right behind me in his truck.
We put our boats in the water and paddled out just a little ways and waited for his brother and wife to show up. They showed up shortly and joined us, as we headed on down to the west end of Penny island.
Here we are headed down to the west end of Penny Island, which is to the left. The water is nice and calm, flat even, nice.
And white pelicans on the island?
We rounded the west end of Penny Island as I wanted to see if there were any white pelicans there and there were.
They were sleeping, but we woke them up as we passed on by. The moved around a little, but didn’t fly off.
We sat around the frolicking harbor seals
There were lots of harbor seals out in front of the west end of Penny Island frolicking around. Here’s just a few of them watching us. They were very active.
We sat around and watched the harbor seals for quite awhile before continuing on down towards the river’s mouth area.
The river’s mouth area for sundown
This is what the river’s mouth area looked like as we approached. The sun is still up, but it is cloudy, which should make a nice sunset.
A light drizzle and a magic rainbow
While we were sitting around waiting for the sun to go down a light drizzle moved into the area. And then, I think we all noticed it at once, a rainbow appeared over our heads.
A very special rainbow, indeed.
One end of it was on the right shore of the river.
And the other end of it was on the left side of the river, or the other side of the river. Which means the rainbow’s ends were on both sides of the river.
See, this is the other side of the rainbow. I couldn’t get the whole thing into a photo, as I was too close to it, it was right over our heads.
Of course, that means there are pots of gold at both ends of the rainbow.
Ray was looking for that pot of gold.
The pot of gold is the Russian River. We all agreed, if we didn’t see any lumens, this rainbow was a big bonus for the evening.
There were more harbor seals swimming around us as we watched the sun go down.
The sun is going down in this photo as we sat in front of the open river’s mouth.
We headed up to eagle’s landing
The sun’s down now and we are headed up to Eagle’s landing to kill some time to wait until lit gets dark enough to see the lumens.
Here’s Ray, as we headed out from the mouth area.
As we passed the boat ramp area, it was already getting dark, but not yet dark enough to see the lumens. The lumens only turn on when it’s dark enough. If it’s too light, they don’t turn on at all. It usually takes about an hour after sunset to get dark enough to start seeing the lumens.
It looks like it’s going to be a good lumens night
But tonight it looked like it was going to get dark enough to see some good lumens. Too dark now to take any more pictures, so I put the camera away as we paddled up the south side of the river, going past Otter’s log and on up to eagle’s landing.
Getting dark enough now to start seeing some lumens
As we approached the eagle’s landing area, it was just starting to get dark enough to see some good lumens and it looked like they were going to be nice and thick too. The others started to see them. It’s a somewhat amazing thing to see and play in.
We paddled around the eagle’s landing area waiting for it to get darker, marveling at the lumens as we splashed around in them with our paddles.
As it darkened more, we started to see fish rocketing under the water. As they move, they cause the lumens to light up. I was surprised to see bigger fish in this area tonight. Usually, I’ve only seen smaller fish below the highway one bridge, but tonight I’m seeing bigger fish, maybe twenty inchers? It’s hard to tell for sure, but a lot of these fish were longer than a foot.
Moving on down the river, exploring for lumens
Since it was now dark we started back down the south side of the river splashing in the lumens and marveling at all the fish we saw rocketing under the water.
Some area’s are super thick with lumens, almost like soup. And there are areas of lesser numbers of lumens as we paddled along.
Lumens down the back channel of Penny Island
We went on down the back channel of Penny Island were the lumens were thick and the fish numerous, even some bigger ones in this area tonight.
We continued on down to the big trees off the west end of Penny Island and there were thick lumens in that area too, but very few fish.
Let’s join the harbor seals
Next, we were hoping to join the harbor seals that were in the water earlier on the west end of Penny Island. We paddled over to the spot they were earlier, but they were all gone. None to be seen.
Oh, well, we did pretty good tonight, remember the rainbow?
We headed on in on a glass surface to the boat ramp and got our boats out of the water. Ray said it was eleven PM.
A super night out on the water
We all agreed it was a super night out on the Russian River estuary watching for the lumens with the bonus rainbow.