Frost and fog

Saturday morning was the coldest night since some day back in April.  We had to scrape frost off the windshields of two cars.  One had my canoe tied to it thanks to some advance planning the night before.  The full moon was still up but the sun was not.  Clay had an open house to get to at work, so we dropped off one car down by the Palmyra bridge and then he dropped me and the canoe at the Rt. 600 bridge on the Rivanna river on his way into town.  It was just beginning to get light, light enough to see the fog rising off the water-a perfect setting for a pre-Halloween float trip. 

It should come as no surprise that I had the river to myself--no other people, no other boats.  I expected that, of course, but there were plenty of other surprises.  Much of the wildlife knows our habits and they clearly didn't expect to see me floating through the fog that early on a cold morning.  Just after starting out I encountered a gaggle of about a dozen geese along the shore.  They took to the water at first and talked about it amongst themselves for a bit before taking flight all at once, beating the water with their wings and alerting everything around us.  It was still too dark for a picture, even if I had been fast enough with the camera, which I wasn't. 

I expected to see deer, but only saw two.  They may still have been bedded down.  I did encounter one big buck having a morning drink.  I didn't see him until he turned to run and might well have passed him by completely unseen if he hadn't moved. 

The water level had dropped enough that I had to do some paddling to make much progress, but I would stop paddling occasionally to pour myself a cup of coffee.  On one such occasion I floated aimlessly but silently towards a very busy kingfisher perched on a limb sticking up from the middle of the river.  It was a spot where the water was shallow, a perfect location from which to ply his trade.  He perched, looked, and then dove into the water, presumably grabbing and devouring something tasty.

I saw either a lot of osprey or the same one repeatedly but didn't see any fishing action out of them.  There were more geese, lots of ducks, and one more deer spotting.  The sun came up eventually and the fog lifted to reveal a beautiful clear, crisp, fall morning.  We are in that 6 week period on the fall that mirrors the 6 beautiful weeks of spring, sandwiched between the miserable humidity of the summers and the muddy winters that are Virginia. 

The entire trip was about 3 hours that morning.  If the water drops much more I'll need to paddle more and pick my route more carefully to avoid being grounded.  I left the beer cooler at home for this trip, needing instead a canoe-friendly coffee mug or cup holder.

The final surprise came near the end of the trip, near a bend in the river, past the sandy beach and just before the Palmyra bridge where my pick up car was waiting.  I saw something slide off a log on the eastern bank of the river.  I first thought it may have been a turtle, but it wasn't a sunny spot where a turtle might have been warming itself, and it just slipped into the water, no plop, no sound.  I drifted closer and saw the unmistakable round (and surprised) face of a river otter staring at me, and another one lolling on its back just behind the same log he had slipped off a few moments before.  They disappeared silently and almost instantaneously, into a burrow in the river bank.  A perfect ending to a perfect trip.