I stayed home today and puttered around in the yard mostly. The wild blackberry vines are getting ahead of me popping up most everywhere in the yard. So I spent a good deal of time cutting some of them back.
Rack bolted on
I finished putting the van’s roof rack back in place a tightened it down, so that’s ready to go.
Harvesting tatters
Towards evening I decided to dig up some potatoes from my potato patch. Most of the dirt was nice and soft so it was easy digging for the tatters, although some weeds had taken a sturdy hold and gave me a work out.
Here’s where I dug up the tatters.
And here’s the tatters ready to be washed up.
Making soup
I saw my brother Tom next door so I went over to see about getting some broccoli he said he was going to harvest.
I got some broccoli and a small head of cabbage. I went on home and cut it all up and put it in my slow cooker for soup with some of the tatters too and other vegetables. Vegetable soup for later. Yummm.
I spent the rest of the day chair hopping around the yard.
Looks like the wind is going to be down enough to get a yak in today. So I was off to Jenner. The sun was out and the wind was down as I arrived at the boat ramp.
River’s mouth is closed
The estuary water level measured 7 feet at the visitor’s center which meant the river’s mouth was closed.
I put my boat in the water and parked my car.
I paddled across the river to Penny Island.
Outa my spot bird
That’s my spot just up ahead, but there’s a great blue heron in it.
I pulled in along side the heron and eventually it got nervous and flew off with a squawk.
Paddling onto the island
Since the water was high I decided to paddle down to the lower end of Penny island and see if I could paddle onto the island there.
So I paddled down along the side of the island headed down river.
It looked like the water level might be just high enough for me to paddle onto the island here.
I paddled over by this big skull and sat for a bit.
I sat and looked back out of the island towards the ocean.
Jenner
As I paddled onto the island it opened up for this view of Jenner looking across the island.
I could see these two ducks resting on that log just in front of me.
Upper end of the island
Eventually I left that area and paddled up the island’s back channel up to this spot on the upper end of the island. I pulled in for a rest.
I could see some birds on the opposite shore and on the other side so I paddled up the river a little ways and crossed over so I could paddle down and check them out.
Checking out some birds
You can see some birds just up ahead on the shoreline.
I paddled by these two cormorants that got a little nervous as I went by.
Here’s some of the geese I paddled by.
An egret was with some of the geese.
Headed on in
I went on by all the birds and headed on in towards the boat ramp.
I got my car and loaded the boat and drove on home for a nap.
Chair hopped
After the nap I went outside. Since I didn’t have any work planned I just puttered around the yard and chair hopped the rest of the day
Seemed like a good day to go down to Jenner to kayak for the day. The only problem with that is the weather guys said it’d be a bit windy today.
I decided to drive on down to Jenner to check out the conditions and decide once I saw how the wind was doing.
River’s mouth overlook
I arrived at the river’s mouth overlook around eleven AM which looked like this from the overlook.
Back to Monte Rio
It was a bit windy, I could go yakking, but did I want to in the wind, maybe I’ll just drive back to Monte Rio to yak for the day.
River’s mouth is closed
This is looking across the river into the Pacific ocean. The river’s mouth has been open just to the right of that rock in the middle but the ocean moved sand up to dam the river up, so the mouth is considered closed.
Just south of that spot this is what the beach looked like. The jetty where the river’s mouth usually goes out this time of year is about in the middle of this picture and you can see the sand bar is closed there too.
When the mouth closes, most of the harbor seals leave the river and stay on the ocean side. These harbor seals were on the river side.
Headed back to Monte Rio
I decided to head on back to Monte Rio and check it out for kayaking. When I arrived in Monte Rio, I felt more like a nap than a yak, so I went on home for that nap.
Some shopping in Guerneville
Once I was rested up a bit, I headed back to Guerneville to do some shopping for food as my cupboards are getting bare.
Came home and put that stuff away and had another nap.
Van’s leaky roof repair
A bit later I went back outside to do some more work on the van’s leaky roof which I’d been working on.
The fix needed one more coat of epoxy to fully seal up the rusted out cracks.
So I mixed up a big batch of a two part epoxy.
I put a coat of epoxy on the roof rack mount to stop the part that sits in the gutter from rusting.
A coat to the gutter
Then I put another coat of epoxy in the gutter which beefed that repair up substansually.
I spent some time smoothing out the epoxy I put in the gutter and cleaned up the tools.
Once the epoxy cures, I can put things back together.
The plan for today was to head on down to Jenner to kayak for the day. But when I got it going I heard the rain coming down so that was out.
Moving on to the next plan
So plan B was to stay home and get some stuff done.
I put the pressure washer back together. Now that it was together and I finally had a washer that worked I could now pressure wash my old Toyota Land Cruiser in the background there.
Pressure washer seems to be fixed
The pressure washer worked fine and never skipped a beat.
The Toyota cleaned up nicely for an old vehicle. The paint looks better than I thought it would. Lots of dings in the paint but the paint that is left still looks pretty good.
Moving to the next steps
So it looks like I can get on with the mechanical stuff that needs done once I figure out where I want to start.
Electrical help
My brother Tom came by and wanted me to look at an electrical problem he was having in one of his houses so we rode over there and I had a look. Turned out it just needed a new circuit breaker and all would work.
I also spent some time hauling brush piles that I had cut in the yard pruning, to the brush pile. And I spent some time trimming wild blackberry vines back, a never ending task.
Yesterday when I was shooting the bull with Joe at his house he said he was going to cut some wood up the hill near where I live so I should come by for a visit.
I found him and his crew hard at it when I arrived just before noon. They were at Bryce’s house near a place called Mount Jackson which used to be a lookout tower.
Up the hill with the wood
The bad part was they had to get the cut logs up the hill and it wasn’t easy and they were getting tired out fast.
The hill
This is the hill they have to pack the wood up to the truck up there.
Lunch time
We stopped and had lunch on Brice’s porch.
Too big for the hill
When they got back to it after lunch they decided the wood pieces were just too big and heavy to get up that hill.
Brice was able to round up an old hammer and a couple wedges so they split the wood up into smaller pieces to make it easy to take up the hill.
Joe continued to cut up the downed madrone tree.
Once Joe was finished cutting up the wood, him and his girl friend started hauling wood up the hill. He pulled, she pushed.
There was quit a view from the spot where they cut wood. That’s the Santa Rosa area down there in the back.
They were worn out about 2:30 when we all went on home for the day.
More work on the van’s leaky roof
After a nap at home I went outside to think about doing some more epoxy work on the van’s leaky roof that I’d been working on.
I mixed up a big batch of epoxy and applied it to the leaky gutter area of the van’s roof top.
Epoxy in the gutter
I pushed the epoxy into the gutter and smoothed it out and now have to let it dry for a day.
That was all I could do on that project until the epoxy sets up.
And that darn pressure washer problem
The pressure washer I’d been working on with no success was sitting there staring at me so eventually I decided to work on that one more time. I planned to hook a gas tank up so the gas was gravity fed to test out the fuel pump.
I rigged the gas tank up above the carb temporarily and gave it a test.
And that didn’t work
Unfortunately the engine would start right up, but when I accelerated the engine died within a few seconds.
We’d be better off with an electric one
My brother Tom came by who owns this pressure washer and said he found a reasonably priced electric pressure washer on the internet and was thinking of getting it.
I said not quite yet, let me think about this for a bit now that I knew some more information on it from my testing.
Contemplating
So I pulled up a chair and sat down for a break to contemplate the situation.
After doing some chair hopping around the yard, I was thinking maybe I had an idea. This machine has spent more than one winter outside and has taken in a lot of water, so maybe and just maybe the spark plug was steaming when the engine rpm increased that grounded the spark from water being in there.
Change the spark plug
So I pulled the plug and hunted through my junk to see if I could find a plug similar to test it out. I found a new suitable platinum plug and installed it.
Running and running
A couple pulls of the rope and it started up. I increased the rpm and it just kept running and running.
By this time it was almost dark, so I dropped everything right there and will finish putting things back together later.
Now that the pressure washer is working I can start cleaning up my old Toyota Land Cruiser.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
