Russian River with Toro and D$

After our Fourth of July plans fell to the wayside due to foggy weather... Toro and D$ called that morning and told us that they were planning to head up to Russian River.  They already had my sea kayak (as our plan was to head out to Tomales Bay)... and Toro had Durbo's kayak stored during their travels.  So we left the bay area around noon loaded up with our canoe and tandem bike on GoodGirl and got out of the fog and into the sun.  On the way up I was reading Ann Dwyer's guidebook figuring out what section of the river we should do.  As we were 30 min ahead of Toro & D$, we dropped off the tandem at Wohler Bridge and drove up the river to Healdsburg Veterans Memorial Beach... the location of our canoe's (yet to be nicknamed...) virgin trip.  And also the finish line for the Great Russian River Race. 

We basically did this run. http://cacreeks.com/russn-hl.htm

When we did thi run, the flow was at 86 CFS.  According to Bill Tuttle there the recommended flow is from 300-1500 cfs... which would have made the ride a bit quicker.  

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryDaily?s=HEA&d=07%2F04%2F2013

D posing with my sexy kayak...

The first riffles...

Kimbo getting her hair ready for the rapids...

Hi Kai!

Common Mergansers... just mergansin' around...

And their chicks...

this was the Jungle-y section... really felt like we were in the middle of nowhere...  I guess there's no good river access through this section.

 

Great Blue Heron

CHECK it OUT!!!! Bald Eagle.  I can't recall the last one I've seen in California.... pretty awesome. We kept seeing it as we'd float past it, then it'd fly past us, over and over... really fun.  I think he was following an osprey around.  

the not too technical section...

Kim was paddling HARD!  Or as I call it when she is on the back of the tandem... "Pretendaling"

There was a nest near the take out with some chicks making lots of noise... 

Toro and I were gonna go team tandem honey badger back up the road 10 miles to our car at Veteran's Memorial bridge, but we happened to catch up to another couple canoeing this same stretch and we ended at the same time.  They had arranged for their son to pick them up so Toro and I hopped in with them which saved us.  On the way back there were police helicopters, and we saw quite a number of policemen in full armor holding machine guns.  Don't know what was going on, but that was intense... After we picked the ladies up we drove to Russian River Brew Co to fill up a growler, but there was a wait to get in... so we moved on...