Lower river drift

Once I had done my long river trip, I had a hankering to do some more, partly to compare the experience with the plastic boat with an experience with the inflatable.  To have the best comparison, I set out to do the first part of the long trip again, down to the little dock, where I planned to pull out.  Only I got smarter about checking for tides, so before leaving the bike anywhere, I checked the river flow 1-2 hours after high tide at the mouth at both spots on the river–the put-in spot and the pull-out spot.  Rather to my surprise–even the second time I checked, there was virtually no downstream flow either place.  Indeed, there seemed to be a slight upstream flow both places, which surprised me, because the put-in spot is something like 14 miles from the mouth.

Tides and weather forecast were all wrong for trying that any time soon, but I had identified a boat ramp on the north bank of the river just a couple of miles from the boat ramp at Bullard’s beach, which seemed to offer a nice, moderate drift/paddle.
Tides and weather were compatible the next day, so off we went–me, inflatable, CJ and bike (for later).  Here’s the boat in the water at the put-in dock.  Notice how wide the river is here–it’s only just over five miles  from the mouth.

Here’s the view shortly after pushing off.

And this is a look back at the dock.

At several points along the way there are old posts sticking up from the water, presumably from old docks or some such.  People have put up bird houses as you see below at some of them.  From the state of the paint on them, I’d say relatively recently.  That’s part of Bandon Marsh in the background, so my guess is that whoever looks after the marsh (which is protected–so far.  A lot of local people resent the h*ll out of that fact, and most of them probably voted for you know who, and public lands are under attack from congress, so . . .) anyway, whoever is responsible for the marsh probably put up the bird houses.

Didn’t take a lot of pictures of the land/waterscape–after one or two, it began to seem redundant, as the scenery didn’t change all that much–but here are a couple.

The bit of a chop you can see on the water was from wind, which fortunately for me blew more across me than in my face.  What you can’t see is that I had timed things well–there was enough current to help me along, so while I did have to paddle, it was a nice mellow paddle altogether.

As you can see above, there wasn’t all that much to see along the way, but there was some bird life.  Saw several of these along the way–they are quite common in the area.  I’ve looked them up more than once, but never remember exactly what they are.  Pictures below are from separate sightings.

More exciting to me were the large birds I saw fishing from shore.  This one is a blue (or gray, I wouldn’t swear to know the difference, though he does look more gray here) heron.

And I feel like I should know what this next one is, but I don’t.  It’s clearly different from the heron above, though.  Different species of heron?  Feel free to enlighten me.

Saw some birds in the air, too.  There was a raptor hunting over the marsh that I didn’t get the camera out quickly enough to catch.  There was also a black bird, I think it was a cormorant maybe, that circled me several times.  I eventually decided to get the camera out for him too, but of course he flew off at that point.

But I did catch this flock flying overhead.

My landing spot was just past the bridge on 101 that crosses the river north of Bandon.  There’s an early glimpse of it in the first bird pic above, and here it is in all its glory.

I’ve driven over that bridge any number of times, so passing under it was one of the more interesting parts of the experience for me, and I took several shots.  Here are a couple on the approach.

A couple while actually underneath it–barely.  The current was pushing me along quite noticeably at this point.

And one looking back upstream right after getting through.

From that point, my destination was close . . .

Closer . . .

Almost there . . .

And docked. looking back at the bridge.

And couldn’t resist taking this picture from where I’d left the bike.

It was just a very short ride back to the car, then back to pick up the boat.  Unfortunately, I’d left some stuff on the dock, including my life vest, and the wind was strong enough by then that the vest blew away.  At least, that’s what I assume it was–in any case it was gone when I got back, and I now have a nice shiny red one that is vastly bigger than I need.

Entire excursion, including inflating and deflating the boat, was less than 2 hours.  From thence–off to lunch in Bandon.