The swells went back up at sea and I couldn't go on any of the kayak trips I planned for this weekend. Instead, I took Marty on a trip up the Russian River in the kevlar canoe. We got in the water at Jenner, but headed up-river instead of going to the mouth of the river as we usually do. We went west under the Bridgehaven Bridge where Highway 1 crosses over the Russian River, and where there is a great Indian restaurant called Sizzling Tandoor. North of this is a side valley with Willow Creek running through it. We have known that there is a primitive state campground on the edge of the river north of the creek, but have never seen it. I decided to paddle all the way up to this campground and check it out. We didn't get started until 12:30pm, and this was a trip of 4 or 5 kilometers each way. This late in the afternoon, I would worry about the wind coming up and making the return trip difficult. But after our last trip on Drakes Estero, I knew that the new skeg would allow us both to paddle at once, and I could count on Marty to help paddle back. So we went all the way around the next bend in the river looking for the campground. On the way, we saw two Harriers Hawks (marsh hawks) flying back and forth on the shore farthest from us. We pulled up to an area where it looked like there were trails running down and along the river, hoping that this was a good indicator. As we were looking for a place to land, two people came down one of the trails and confirmed (verbally) that we had found the campground. The water was deep all along here, so we found a flat grassy spot of bank, paddled right up against it and rolled out of the canoe onto the grassy shore. We discovered that we had landed just below campground number 10. There are picnic tables with food lockers, barbecue equipment, and a long walk to the pit toilet. I started thinking we could meet my brother Paul here for a canoe camping trip. The hard part was trying to figure out how to work a dinner at the Sizzling Tandoor into the schedule...
As we started back, 5 kayakers came down the river towards us. We could hear them talking behind us, and Marty wanted to get ahead of them so we would have another chance to watch the Harriers Hawks. So she picked up the second paddle and we zoomed down the river. Unfortunately, the hawks were not there on the way back. Around the first corner, the wind came up and blew spray over the nose of the canoe onto Marty. We drifted over to the north side of the river in the hopes of getting into the wind shadow of the bank of the river. This either worked really well, or the wind died down. Either way, we had a nice trip back to Jenner.