I posted two blogs today, this one and the one below this one.
River’s mouth has been breeched
It looked like it was going to be a warm day so I was off to Jenner this morning. I put my boat in the water and paddled across to Penny island where these two great blue herons were fishing. I sat and watched and was taking it easy.
Great blue herons do a dance
Eventually I noticed the herons were doing something weird. They had their feathers all puffed up. It appeared to be some kind of dance which they did for about five minutes before continuing to fish. I took a video which I’ll post when I get some time.
Mouth is open wide
I headed on down to the mouth to see what was going on as they opened it yesterday while I was gone.
Nice day as I headed on down that way.
I found the river’s mouth wide open with lots of harbor seals and birds on the shore and in the water.
I hung around watching things for a bit, then headed on over to the little slot on the back channel of Penny Island where I sat some more in this spot.
Eventually I moved on up the river where I ran into these mallard ducks all sleeping as I passed by. I was surprised I didn’t disturb them.
I pulled in by these big redwood logs and sat and enjoyed the nice day for a bit.
Ducks by Paddy’s rock
Then I moved on up the river a bit more across from Paddy’s rock where I saw this big family of merganser ducks. They were fishing as a group just before going to shore here for a break right by Paddy’s rock on the right.
I had work to do on my old van so I didn’t stay too long today and went on home.
Trying to find out what was wrong with the van engine
After a nap and a break I started getting the stuff together to work on the van. I needed to remove the oil pan to see if I broke a rod or what. It all went well except for the piece of metal I was removing that fell and hit me in the nose which hurt a bit and caused some bleeding and a lot of grease and dirt on my face.
Here’s the van jacked up so I could get under it to remove the oil pan.
No broken rod and can’t find what’s wrong
I got the oil pan off. I tried to inspect the rods as bet I could and didn’t find any broken rods. I looked and and looked as best I could and didn’t find anything obviously wrong so I thought I’d remove the spark plugs to see what they looked like.
However this plug was bad
I found the number four cylinder from the front had no spark gap which indicates something is wrong on that cylinder to cause this, but what?
Here’s the spark plug with the closed gap. It wasn’t real beat up though.
I checked the rod and cylinder of that one from the bottom again, but still can’t see anything wrong with that one. It got dark so I had to quit on that for the day.
I think I will have to pull the head off to see what’s going on to find out some more about this problem. Maybe tomorrow after I kayak a bit.
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.
