The River’s Mouth Opens In an Interesting Spot While We Watch

Wednesday October 26, 2016 Jenner CA.

The river’s mouth opens in a new spot

It was overcast as I drove into Jenner today, but at least the wind was down and it wasn’t rainy. I put my boat in the water and paddled across the river to Penny Island. As I crossed the river, I thought I felt a bit of current which would indicate the river’s mouth was open. However the water was high, so if it was, it was just opening up, but I wasn’t sure.

Anyway, I decided to head down to the river’s mouth and see what was going on. I paddled down along Penny Island and it looked like this.

Penny Island has water on it

The water level was at the eight foot level on the gauge at the visitor center so part of Penny Island was under water, so I paddled into it for a bit and sat by this big ol redwood stump to check things out.

I paddled down to the bottom end of the island where I went by these cormorants resting on a log.

Ray shows up in his boat

I was sitting here at the bottom end of Penny Island just about to cross over the river to go down by the river’s mouth when I heard Ray behind me in his boat.

He joined me and we headed slowly down to check out the mouth area.

The mouth is in the process of opening up

We could see the river’s mouth had opened by itself not very long ago  and was just in the process of opening up. There were lots of birds resting in the area. And occasionally, they all would jump into the air then land again.

The ocean had some big waves breaking on the jetty rocks.

We could see the mouth had just opened up and was just getting started washing out all the sand. The ocean was going to low tide which helps this process along quite a bit.

Lots of birds in the area

There were lots of birds resting on the shore. Mostly pelicans and seagulls.

End of the river

We paddled on down to the end of the river and sat around for an hour or so just watching and shooting the bull.

This as our view from the end of the river every time the birds jumped into the air for whatever reason.

These harbor seals were taking it easy resting on some sand in the shallow water.

This has never happened before

Eventually we paddled back over in front of the freshly opening mouth where we noticed the current had picked up a lot as the water continued to wash out the sand and open the mouth wider and deeper.

Did you notice

You likely didn’t notice, but something interesting is going on which I have never seen happen down here before. It shows in the above picture.

What’s going on is the river’s mouth is washing out between the jetty and the rocks on the right , just behind the sand, which was part of the jetty. The way the mouth has opened is right through this spot which should cause it to wash out a lot of rocks and sand which might create some kind of new channel through that spot as the whole estuary is full of water and it looks like it is going to wash through that spot, again which I’ve never seen it do before. There’s enough force from all the water that has to drain to do something like maybe wash a new channel through the jetty. We didn’t wait around to find out.

Up the island’s back channel

We left it doing it’s thing and headed on over to the island’s back channel here.

We paddled on up the back channel at a slow pace and eventually made it up to the island’s upper end where we stopped and took it easy while the sun came out.

From the top end of the island we headed on in for the day which looked like this as we crossed back over to the boat ramp.

We went on home.

Checked the van’s engine’s timing

After a good nap, I went outside and warmed the van’s engine up and then checked the timing and monkeyed with the idle some more.

I’ve tried every thing I can think of and it still doesn’t idle like it should, it’s rough, so I think I’m about ready to call the people that made the TBI kit and ask them for advice as they recommend doing that if one can’t get the idle right. They may have to change the information they programed into the prom I had them do for the V8. I wanted to check all my options before I called them.

That was about it for the day for a good one.