Monday March 24, 2014 Jenner CA.
A bit foggy today too
Today, the Sonoma County Water Agency was going to open up the closed river’s mouth to the ocean.
On the way, driving down to Jenner, I passed the excavator returning on it’s truck, which was unusual as the opening of the mouth usually takes about a half a day. But from looking at the closed mouth yesterday, I knew there wasn’t much sand to remove to open it up, so they must of already got that accomplished?
I drove on down to the highway one overlook of the river’s mouth area and there weren’t many people there either, like there usually was.
I got out of the car and took this picture of the opened River’s mouth. That’s a flock of cormorants in the river. The water from the river was flowing nicely to the ocean. They had opened it up and already left it to do it’s thing.
Ray pulled in, in his truck shortly after I arrived.
I saw a lady seal biologist I know sitting there in her car watching and counting seals, so I talked to her about it. Seems they only took about eight minutes to open up the closed mouth today. I talked with her about seals and stuff for awhile and give her some data on recent bird spotting’s I’d made recently, like what kind and how many eagle’s we’d seen lately.
After awhile Ray and I headed back to the launch site and put our boats in the water. It was a foggy day, but still fairly nice out, with a light wind.
The gauge at the visitor center read about nine feet when we put the boats in the water, but would drop fairly soon as the river’s mouth was opening even wider all the time. It had just reached the visitor center deck, but was on it’s way down now.
These snails were spared
We paddled across the river to Penny Island and on up to it’s east end. Ray spotted these snails high on the weeds, just above the water. If the water continued to rise, they’d be dead, but the water was on it ‘s way down, so they got a reprieve.
There were several snails that were going to survive and a bunch that were only shells in the water that didn’t’ make it.
We continued to paddle on up the river about a mile at a leisurely pace, of course, stopping along the way and enjoying the river.
We made it almost up to the highway one bridge before turning around and heading back down the river on the south side.
Here is Ray, as we went by the Eagles’ Landing area on our way back down the river.
A nice piece of redwood
Ray has been watching this big redwood slab for a week or so now. It’s temping to salvage this big slab as it has real nice wood in it and wood make a nice table or something for someone that wanted to clean it up. Only problem was, Ray didn’t really need this piece of wood and would mean a lot of work, if he picked it up, but he was surely temped.
Here he is with the big slab of wood. It’s 8 or 10 feet long and even like this is worth at least a few hundred dollars. It was on and off for awhile. Let’s get it, let’s not? :O)
He finally decided to just push it out in the river and see where it ended up? If it ended up near the take out ramp, he would get it later, but if he was lucky, it would go out to sea or someplace else. We left it drifting here and didn’t see it the rest of the day, but it still might show up again, maybe we haven’t seen the last of it yet. :O)
We passed a pair of Mallards as we continued on down the river and down the back channel of Penny Island headed for the river’s mouth area.
The mouth of the river was nicely opened up
It was fairly foggy down by the river’s mouth. The mouth had opened up fairly wide and was dropping the water level fairly fast now.
This is a picture of the opened Russian River mouth, looking out to sea, where the big rock is.
Some cormorants were sitting on a rock in the area.
And there were some harbor seals resting on the beach.
We hung around the mouth area for quite awhile before heading on in for the day.
This is our view of Jenner as we headed on in for the day. A bit foggy, but fairly warm and not too bad out.
Checking the water level gauge at the visitor center, the level had dropped more than three feet while we were out there. It always seems such a waste to realize the loss of all that fresh water just dumping into the ocean, which seems a little wasteful when fresh water is in such demand.
We watched for that big redwood slab hoping we wouldn’t see it again as we’d have to likely deal with it. Lucky for us, we didn’t see it again. My back didn’t really want to deal with it, but it sure is a temping thing.
Even though it was a foggy day, it was rather nice out. The sun came out a couple times too, but didn’t last long.
We pulled our boats out of the water and went on home for the day.
That was it for the day, another nice one.