Tag Archives: water

Whitewater Rafting – South Fork of American River

AmericanRiverSouthFork016Wow.. what a great time we had! First off, big thanks to Isaac G. for setting up this kick-ass outing. As usual, it was a cast of crazy characters; and also keeping with tradition.. we bought the photos!

For this trip, we went with American Whitewater Expeditions. Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 11.34.47 AM

AWE is locate in Coloma, CA, deep in the Sierra foothills.
Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 11.40.37 AM

Starting at Zero-Dark-Thirty in Santa Cruz, we headed over to Fit for Speed, located in Club Autosport to meet up with the group of yahoos we’d be rafting (and swimming) with today.

After fueling up on carbs and caffeine we made the 3+ hour journey out past Sacramento. Everything was going smooth, until we tried to stop for lunch. Someone had the brilliant idea of meeting at Inn-N-Out burger in Rancho Cordova to re-assemble our convey. This part of the plan worked great!

Kevin and Beth AmericanRiverSouthFork001 were traveling with us. It didn’t take for them to start looking up all the awesome ways to order burgers. We had A PLAN!

Once we arrived on location however, things started to go sideways. Someone suggested we go somewhere that had salads. Using the trusty (right…) interwebs, a Mediterranean place about 1/2 miles away was located with GREAT Yelp reviews and we were on our way. We had about 20 min. to eat or we’d be late for our trip, which advised us to have a HEARTY lunch as we’d be on the river for about 5 hours (paddling at least 1/2 that time I might add). I won’t go into all the details but I’ll say that Amore in Rancho Cordova is CRAP! Took us 45 min. to get what food we could (I had to cancel my order) and what we received was over-priced pig slop. Deb and I split a hideous omelet was we raced into the mountains, already very late for a very mandatory on-time trip orientation. Isaac was able to smooth things over with AWE and despite arriving very late, we managed to make it onto the river!

I think a great time was had by all. Our boat didn’t require a safe-word… nuff said about that.

So here my words end, and I offer up the photos purchased from the entertaining, and I think you’ll agree great photographer that captured the fun. Thanks to Kevin at KBar photo for taking the great pics shown here.

This will HAVE to be done again!!

Some photos from the O’Neil Coldwater Classic

Granted, it’s been a couple of weeks since the pros packed up and headed off to Pipeline for the last event on their years tour. I’m not always the quickest to get photos uploaded, with clients to service, mouths to feed, cars and bikes to work on and in there somewhere I try to have a little fun for myself.

So this morning I’m pulling up some pics from a few weeks ago that I’ve wanted to post up. One of these days I’ll get my watermarking done, but for now.. I’ll just have to trust that nobody finds these compelling enough to steal (here’s hoping).

Saturday trip around Puget Sound with kids and cameras.

One of the things I did today, was sign up for ‘foursquare‘, an app that lets you ‘check-in’ to places, and those with participating incentives will send coupons to your phone. It’s and interesting experiment. I’ll see how that works out today.

M.V. Kitsap mid-sound, enroute Bremerton
Passengers on stern pickle-forks of ferry M.V. Kitsap
M.V. Kitsap about to make starboard turn into Rich Passage.
M.V. Kitsap foreground, Olympic National Park, background.

Sea Lions at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Pier

Sea Lions! Tons of sea lions!. I’m sure that’s and underestimate.

Normally on the boardwalk you would see a few seals up under the main wharf, but it appears that they have invated the Stagnaro’s boat launch, and, well, see for yourself. It looks like the aftermath of some sort of frat party or Roman toga orgy.

What you used to find, a few stragglers under the wharf.
Now, it's a seal pile!
Marine mamals, everywhere!
It sort of makes you wonder, if they heeded the warning.
I was treated to some mamal aeorbatics.
Some made better choices than others, regarding their LZ.
This provides a little more perspective on the mass of blubber and fins.
This has nothing to do with sea lions, it's the street side of The Boardwalk