Bones & Spermy like creatures

The day started out great, it was a bit chilly with a heavy wind from the west but the sun was out and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Stuart, Tim & I loaded up and canoed from Meadville to Highway 183. This part of the rive is a bit more shallow and a whole lot wider. The purpose of the trip was to do some water quality testing along some of the creeks that dump into the river. I learned a lot about how to read the river and find where the channels are and where they are going.

I was in my favorite kayak which is the gray. I ended up naming it 'Smokey' after an old house cat we used to have. I don't know if I mentioned this already but I named my favorite canoe 'Sport' after my horse that my dad gave me, Sport the horse wasn't much of a kid horse so he was something of a challenge to work with but eventually I got a feel for how to control him and he turned out to be a damn good horse. I can say the same for Sport the canoe, it has a much more pronounced rocker, which makes it very responsive to my paddle strokes, sometimes too responsive, but its fun to take on the rapids and eddys, I will just have to figure out how to control it.

On the way back into town we stopped at The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) Headquarters. We talked a bit to the people there, one of them is Tracy Nelson which is an old friend of Grams & Pappy's. I saw a lot more of her when I was a kid, she lived just down the street of G&P.

Here are a few pics of things that I found today during our trek.This is an old turtle bone fossil I found at Jewel Creek, I'll have to do some research on it to find out more. It inspired me to make two Jurassic Park references because of it, one of them was the 'man thats a big pile of shit' joke. No one laughed...

These are the tadpoles that I found in a pool on a sandbar. They totally reminded me of how much our friend Ashley would go crazy over catching minnows at the river. Anyway, I named them in honor of my friends who have left Nebraska to grow up and start their lives, kind of symbolic isn't it? The spunky looking one that has a little bottle of Captain Morgan is named Rachel, the one just sitting there by himself is named AJ, and the one molesting everyone in the water is named Andy. And yes, those are cheerios that I am feeding them, what the hell do tadpoles eat?

I am going to the Lincoln/Omaha area for the weekend, so my entries might be scant but I will do my best. Peace out!