Friday November 7, 2014 Jenner CA.
The weatherman predicted another nice day so I headed down to Jenner to kayak for the day.
I could see Ray and his brother John were here today as their trucks were in the parking lot. As I put my boat in the water, I could see them paddling down towards the closed river mouth area, into the fog that was just starting to come in.
I paddled over to Penny Island and along it’s shoreline.
This was my view as I paddled along, headed into the fog that was just starting to drift in.
Fog
As I entered the fog, I passed a bunch of seagulls and some pelicans preening and resting in the water.
This was my view as I approached the closed river mouth area, where I expected to run into Ray and John.
Lots of seagulls
There was a huge bunch of seagulls landed on the sand there and more were coming in by the minute.
I found Ray and John walking on the sand at the closed mouth. When they got back in their boats, we sat here in the fog for over an hour, just enjoying the day and shooting the bull.
Eventually we got tired of that and left the area and headed over to the flooded Penny Island.
We passed this brown pelican in the fog with some seagulls.
Sun
A little ways past the pelican, the fog was gone and it started to left off all of the river.
Headed to Penny Island as the fog just lifted.
Flooded Penny Island
We paddled through some grasses to get into the part of Penny Island that is flooded because of the closed river’s mouth.
Here we sat around in this area for quite some time as it was so peaceful.
What’s that
As we left the flooded island, we were going through this grassy area to get back to the river, when I spotted something moving in the water off to the left.
Otter
I could see there was at least one otter moving in the grass, but the grass was hiding it so I couldn’t get any pictures. But there was some big redwood logs laying in the water, so I focused on the first one it would swim by hoping it would hop up on the log.
It just swam by that log, so I focused on the next big log and there, I had some success. The sun was in the back of the otters, so all I could get were backlit pictures of these guys.
The otter stayed up on the log for a bit, getting some sun and doing some grooming.
As we were watching that otter, we caught some more movement at the left end of the stump on the ground. It was hard to see, but we finally determined that there was one more otter.
It’s easy to see the otter on the top of the log, but can you see the one at the bottom left of the log?
We left the otters to do their thing. John went on in for the day and Ray and I continued paddling up the back channel of Penny Island.
Lots of birds
But before we started off that way, I took this picture down towards the river’s mouth area, where we’d been in the fog a bit earlier. See all the birds down there. Most of them are seagulls.
Ray and I took our time paddling up the back channel and went in for the day from there.
The fog and the sun made for another nice day kayaking around the Russian River Estuary.
