Thanksgiving

Early Thanksgiving morning (early for getting up on a holiday anyway) the kayak guy and I set off for a paddle along the Oakland estuary. Thanksgiving being a day off for even the port workers things were wonderfully quiet on the water. No ships docked at the port, no trucks roaring by, only a few lone sailboats and the very occasional Amtrak whistle breaking the silence. The grebes and pelicans were out in force though. One of the pelicans scooped up a small fish as I watched. As we reached the mouth of the estuary the clouds parted and the warm sun beamed down. Since it was high tide we paddled around to Middle Harbor park to see what was happening. We scared up a few ducks, hard to tell what they were, I think some bufflehead, a few coots and some others that were too far away to identify. The shorebirds were mostly off somewhere else as the mudflats were covered by the tide. On the way back I seal swam quickly past, huffing and puffing on his way back out to the bay. A heron stalking along the shore, scored a small meal. And we slowly made our way back to the dock to join the hustle and bustle of the rest of the day.