Boy does that feel good

Ice out ! Well it happened a couple days sooner than the April 15th prediction I made so the ol river messed up the 3 years in a row record. We could see it working it's way downriver and on the 13th walla, she was open and good to go, kinda. You've seen this before but this is the still mushy ice soon to be running water as seen from the sand spit here at Mile 14.

I took that picture while it was still a little morningish after coming home from the gym. The sun came out and within a few hours this how the boat launch looked...

Being a river man I have to say that this year it's little quieter, a little weird. There's just not as many birds around yet and I just don't know what would account for that. Usually at ice out you hear seagulls immediately and of course the whoosh whoosh whoosh of Mergansers. But this year it's just not the same. Of course we have some Eagles looking for their favorite river perch and some Mergansers and huge Golden eyes but not in the numbers we're used to. And the Seagulls just haven't got the word yet I guess, maybe I oughta make a dump run and let them know. The more I think about it it seems me and MPeasy had a similar discussion in Mexico, we just didn't see the same amount of shorebirds there either. We noticed very few Oyster Catchers, Herons and Egrets and the different Piper's weren't as noticeable AND now that I think of it the Mexican equivalent of the Seagull the Peilcano seemed to be less numerous. mmmmmmm..... just wondering.....

I got to walk down to Fall-in-Hole on the warmest , nicest spring day ever I think. I called MP when I was half way down and told her that with the temp in low 50's and the sun reflecting off the ice it was the warmest I'd been since Mazatlan. The shore ice was frozen solid and about  4 foot deep on average. It dropped straight off to the river so getting down to look for goodies was kinda difficult. Here's the view from the tip of Stewart's Island looking into Fall-in-Hole, soon to be visited by yours truly in a 21 ft Alumaweld guideboat...It's hard to believe I'll have a boat in this same photo in 3 weeks, things happen fast here....pretty nice back yard eh ?

So with the sun out and life about as good as you can ask for we fired up the sauna. I guess I'm a little rusty on that deal as I took some really well seasoned birch down on the 4-wheeler and kinda over loaded the wood stove. I road up to get our water, beer and sauna partner and when we returned it was already hot at the perfect 180 degrees....Well , as good as we are at the sauna it was still getting hot and before you know it we were tipping 200 degrees so we took a couple outside breaks and tried to cool it off. Once again we got in the sauna and I heard a 'pop' just like a champagne cork makes...yikes it had melted the top off the shampoo and created some pressure to send the squirter flying....Here's sauna expert with the melted bottle, the temp was 207. Ya know I'm one of the few guys who has had a wood fired sauna for 20 years and haven't burned it down ...but we're getting closer.