Watching Waves and Ray and I Go for a Little walk on Penny Island

Tuesday October 21, 2014 Jenner CA.

The river Mouth should get breached on Wednesday

I saw Ray’s truck in the parking lot as I put my boat in the water. I could see him headed down towards the river’s mouth, so I headed on down that way and joined him at the closed mouth area. The ocean was just coming off high tide and was real rough as waves broke over the sand bar into the river.

Breach notice posted

Ray said he saw the posting on the door of the visitor center that they were going to open the river’s mouth tomorrow, Wednesday. Only little problem was they said they’d open it on Thursday, the 22. Thursday is the 23. Since they usually post the opening of the mouth the day before, I assume they meant Wednesday?

So, tomorrow, they’ll try to open it up, but it has to be safe to do so, meaning all those waves breaking over the sand bar need to stop for it to happen.

We sat and watched as waves broke over the sand bar into the river for quite a spell. Up on the overlook on highway one, we could see these spectators watching too.

The great blue heron was here again today fishing and doing fairly well at it too. There were also some cormorants fishing right in front of us catching many small fish of some kind?

A harbor seal heads over the sand bar to the ocean.

All the waves coming over the sand bar from the ocean bring in a lot of foam. Below, I’m sitting right in front of the sand bar as waves are flowing over it.

The ocean seemed to be getting a little calmer so eventually, we left that area and headed on over to Penny Island and paddled onto the flooded part here on the west end.

It was nice and calm in this spot, but the wind was picking up out on the river.

By the time we came off the island the wind had picked up a little more and the ocean seemed to be getting rougher as we could hear all the noise of the waves crashing ashore.

This was our view as we came off the island looking down to the mouth area where we had been earlier.

The slot

We went over to check out what I call the slot to see if we could paddle into the swamp that was back there, but all the bushes prevented us from getting our boats back into the swamp.

Penny Island walk

We paddled up the back channel of Penny island to the east end where we decided there was just enough room, barely, to get our boats out of the water so we could go to shore for a walk. Most of Penny Island is under water, except for where the houses were.

This is what’s left of the main house on the island as we walked past it.

Otter scat

Ray is looking at some otter scat. Seems one or two otters bedded down in this spot just a short time ago as the scat was rather fresh.

We walked down the trail until we ran into water and that’s as far as we could go, so we headed on back.

This is the milk barn, which I think was also the place they used to process fish and animals they sold locally. It’s the only building that remains standing on the island.

We headed back to our boats where we noticed that the wind had really picked up, so we pulled into this spot in the little channel on the east end of the island.

Since the wind was up, the waves were up too as we paddled across to the take out. I took one of the waves over the side which got my pants all wet. Looked like I wet my pants. That’s boating.

A bunch of wood had drifted into the boat ramp, so Ray went in first and moved some of the wood out of the way so I could make an easy landing. You have to land and quickly get out of your boat before a wave comes over the side. I made it.

Here’s the boat ramp where I’m about ready to load my boat.

I went on home for the day and hit the nap area for another nice day on the water.