Rain Fog Clear, River’s Otters and Harbor Seals Paddling the Russian River Estuary

Saturday December 10, 2016 Jenner CA.

Rained hard but it let up

It was raining hard this morning as I woke up.

And the telephone company hadn’t fixed my internet connection yet. So as I got it going I decided to go down the road to Ray’s house to use his internet connection to post yesterdays blog.

Drove to Ray’s to post the blog

It was noon as I drove down to Ray’s and the rain had mostly stopped. Ray had just settled down for a nap, but he answered the door a little on the grouch side. I told him I needed to post my blog then I was going down to Jenner for a paddle. He decided he was bored enough today, so thought he’d go paddling with me.

Heading for Jenner

After my blog was posted, we headed on down to Jenner. It rained a bit on the way down, but by the time we got to Jenner the rain had mostly stopped, but it was foggy instead.

John’s been to emergency several times

We put our boats in the water at the boat ramp. As we were getting ready to take off, John who lives down this way and picks up a lot of Jenner’s trash showed up, so we talked for a bit. He was telling me he’d spent a good part of last week at emergency for his heart troubles. We heard him out then headed on down through the fog.

Here’s John at the boat ramp.

Paddling in the fog

Ray and I headed down river towards the river mouth area in the fog.

It wasn’t long before the fog lifted and cleared on out.

River’s otters up ahead

I saw something move up ahead and was asking Ray what he thought that movement up ahead was. Otters.

Yes, river otters up ahead feeding away on something, but I couldn’t make out what they were eating.

We watched them feeding for a bit, then moved off down towards the river’s mouth.

Fog cleared and no wind

Like I said, the fog had cleared out and the the wind was also down for a real nice day now as we paddled down to the mouth area up ahead.

The river’s mouth was wide open and flowing out to the north as it does when the river’s water flow increases in the winter.

Looking out into the ocean

Here’s looking out the open mouth into the ocean. We didn’t get too close as there was a fair current flowing out into the ocean and we sure didn’t want go to out there.

We didn’t stay in the mouth area very long and turned and headed back up the river.

We paddled by these grebe.

Wondering if the otters are still over there

We were crossing over here when I asked Ray if he thought the otters were still over there to the left and we veered over there to see.

Sure enough, the otters were still there feeding away.

They checked us out, but they weren’t going to leave, not when they had a good food find like this one.

They were eating a pile of crab

They were into a pile of crab. When the water comes up from the rains, it messes up the salt water layers down deep and these crab need salt water an oxygen, so when they lose it, they tend to pile up in certain spots on the edges trying to stay alive. These spots make the crab easy pray and that is what the otter’s have found, so they eat and eat, one right after the other.

This one has a crab it’s eating.

It was making a lot of noise crunching the crab as we watched. I was able to move in fairly close under these kind of conditions as the otters didn’t want to give up this easy meal.

We watched away

We watched them. Once in awhile one of them would bring a small fish up and eat it too, but they were mostly eating crab.

Ray and I left them eating away and paddled over to Penny Island to see if the water was high enough to flood the island, but it wasn’t quite high enough, so we paddled up the back channel of the island and out the topside.

Harbor seals up ahead

Ray says lets go up just a little further to those snags over there, so we paddled over and found a couple of harbor seals resting on the logs. These are a couple of the ones that know me well so they didn’t take off.

It was almost five PM by now, so we headed on in for the day and the sky looked like this as we paddled on over to the boat ramp.

We took our boats out of the water and went on home for the day and that was my day pretty much.

Still no internet, posted from Ray,s house.