Marty and I Do a Leisurely Paddle From Monte Rio to Villa Grande and Back On the Russian River

Wednesday October 8, 2014 Monte Rio CA.

My friend Marty came by about eleven this morning. We loaded another kayak on the car and headed down to Monte Rio to kayak for the day.

This is the boat ramp at Monte Rio where we put our boats in the water to a real nice day.

We decided to head on down the river in this direction.

We didn’t go far before we pulled in under some trees and out of the sun where we sat for awhile before continuing a little further and did the same thing.

Marty spotted this great blue heron hanging out getting some sun.

We are just above Villa Grande in this picture at another stopping spot.

There was a turtle getting sun on a log just above the Villa Grande hole. About eight inches or so. long in the shell.

We pulled on in to the Villa Grande hole, off to the right and sat and had lunch and sat some more. This is as far as we went today, before heading on back. Do you see the cormorants in the dead tree?

I did.

We sat around at Villa Grande hole enjoying the day and shooting the bull. Not many people on the river today, which is always nice.

We finally got tired of sitting in that spot and started back up the river, just as leisurely as we came down.

Something caught our eyes over in the weeds which turned out to be some coots. Here’s one of them.

And something was moving in the weeds just above that that turned out to be three grebe. Here’s two of them, the other one did a dive.

We continued paddling back up to Monte Rio. The river is flat and like a lake right now with the river’s mouth closed at Jenner, it backs the water up past Monte Rio to the Vacation beach dam.

Just below Monte Rio we spotted this great blue heron in the weeds getting some sun. I was pretty sure we could get fairly close to it for pictures because Monte Rio has some friendly birds as no one bothers them much in this area. Sure enough, we got real close to it, about twenty feet.