Monday -- April 2, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 4.8     Water Temperature: 46

Ferry is open!

I was a little surprised that we had to close the ferry over the weekend but I guess that the rain, mixed with the melting snow up in the mountains, was enough to push the river over the edge. There is more rain in the forecast this week, so we may be forced to close the ferry again on Thursday.

Big news, I finally rebuilt the ferry landing on the Island! The old one was rotting out and becoming hazardous to walk on. I shored it up last fall but I had been waiting for the weather to warm up before I took on the job of installing the new one. The new dock is so nice and sturdy, and it actually looks more like a pier now, rather than a dock.

It was not an easy job, especially the part when I was pile-driving the ten-foot 4X4's into the muddy river bottom with a 16-pound sledge hammer. It wasn't easy, but "something worth doing is worth doing right", and I'm very please with my end result and I think that we now have a dock that will serve us for many years.

I remember, back in 2003 when long-time Club captain, John Matthews, and I did the original extension of the dock. Back then we extended it three feet out from where former caretaker, Ken Fassler's walkway ended. We had to extend it because the river was silting up on that side of the Island and the ferry could not reach the landing in low water.
The accumulation of silt is still an ongoing problem today, and with the Island growing on that side, I was forced to extend the dock a full eight feet from the end of Ken's walkway. This will make it a lot easier to reach the Island when the river is low.

To my dismay,(and delight) the pier somehow ended up being perfectly level!?

Tuesday -- April 3, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 4.6     Water Temperature: 51

I took advantage of the recent high water and shoved the swim float back out into the river. Heavy things are easier to move through water, that's the whole reason that they dug a canal here right? Now it's ready to be hooked up to the anchor out in the middle of the river.

Wednesday -- April 4, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 5.0     Water Temperature: 51

The ferry is now closed.

I can't believe it but the river is rising again and we had to shut down the ferry. Sadly, it looks like the ferry will be closed all day tomorrow too.

Friday -- April 6, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 5.7     Water Temperature: 48

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it looks like the ferry will have to be closed all weekend. Not that anyone really wants to be on the river anyway with this soggy and cold weather.

I was hoping that the flower walk people would be able to come over on Saturday to see our bluebells, they are almost peaking right now. I'm hopeful that the river will go down soon so that everyone has a chance to see this bluebell spectacle. Maybe next weekend at the workfest.

These nesting Canada geese are so mysterious. We have two active nests on the Island and I thought for sure that we would have a third but it looks like that third couple might have given up. First I noticed that they had dug a little goose-sized depression in the sand at the top of the Island. This in itself was weird since I've never seen a nest dug into the ground. Usually it is just lots of leaves and feathers piled up. The hole sat empty for a while until one day there was a goose sitting there. The next time I went by there, the goose had gone but there was a single egg in the nest. Then, the next day the egg was gone and there was no sign of it. Now, it is just an empty, abandoned nest. Strange.

I had the pleasure of seeing a horned grebe yesterday. It was fishing in the channel and it was hard to get a good look at it since it would stay under water for several minutes. How do they do it? This particular bird was not in it's full breeding plumage of red and yellow but I could see how the feathers were already staring to change.

Sunday -- April 8, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 4.8     Water Temperature: 48

The ferry is open!

It looks like the forecast was a little off and the ferry is happily open again. Not that it's really an Island sort of day, kind of cold and windy. But a good day to see the bluebells all the same.

Monday -- April 9, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 4.5     Water Temperature: 48

It was a cold day for the flower walk on Saturday but hopefully some members showed up and saw some Spring wildflowers. The bluebells on the Island are just about at their peak. Apparently there are some other ways to refer to these special blooms. The botanical name is Mertensia-virginica. Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, named the genus, Mertensia to honor the 18th century German botanist Franz Martens, and the species name refers to the colony of Virginia. Some of the other common names include Virginia Cowslip, Roanoke bells, Lungwort and oysterleaf. Thomas Jefferson grew blubells at Monticello, so sometime they were referred to as Jefferson's blue funnel flowers.

We also have other flowers blooming right now like white trout lilies and hundreds of Spring beauties. Mary learned that the bulbs of the Spring beauties are edible and are called fairy spuds. I guess we'll have to give them a taste.

It's been an incredible week of birding. I'm sure that all of these birds pass through here every year but it's not every year that I'm lucky enough to see them. I've seen waterfowl in the channel, like the Blue-winged teal and Green-winged teal. On the towpath I saw a wood thrush, some white-throated sparrows and an indigo bunting. Right here on the Island I saw a pine warbler, palm warbler, yellow-throated warbler, and a blue-gray gnat catcher! Spectacular!

Not to mention the birds that come here to nest like the pheobes, gold finches and house finches.

Club meeting this week on Wednesday night. there should be a good turnout since we will be pulling the names out of the hat for the new waitlisters.

Friday -- April 13, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 3.9     Water Temperature: 56

Alert! The Workfest that was scheduled for this Sunday, April 15, has been postponed because of possible rain. The new date for the 2018 Spring Workfest is Sunday April 29.

If any of you can't make it on the 29th and you want to volunteer this Sunday I WILL be here. I don't think it's going to rain until later.

Also, The Park Service just closed the trail from the upper parking lot. The old trolley trestle was recently inspected by engineers and has been condemned by Metro. There is a soft barrier there now but soon Metro will be erecting an 8-foot, chain-link fence. Then, to add insult to injury, they plan to close the spiral bridge over the parkway as well?!

Tuesday -- April 17, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 5.4     Water Temperature: 50

The ferry is closed because of high water. They are predicting that the river will continue to rise until tomorrow night, with a crest of about eight feet. Let's hope we can open again by the weekend.

It's funny, it was only gently raining when I went to bed last night and I slept so hard that I didn't realize that it had stormed overnight. I didn't realize, that is, until I looked out and saw the river. The rain had transformed the river and in the early morning sunlight, it looked like a giant, muddy-orange brick, slowly drifting by with all of the driftwood and litter that the rain has collected from the countryside.

Below is a link to a story on WTOP about our trail that is now closed

https://wtop.com/montgomery-county/2018/04/montgomery-co-trail-under-compromised-former-trolley-trestle-closed/

Friday -- April 20, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 6.1     Water Temperature: 50

The ferry is closed today and tomorrow and maybe Sunday as well. It's too bad that the ferry is closed again but we really haven't had a lot of canoeing weather yet this year.

The river crested on April 18 at 8.42 feet, which is about 84,000 cubic feet of water rolling by here every SECOND. One cubic foot of water weighs about 62 pounds, which means that there was over 5 million pounds of river going by here every second! No wonder we had to close the ferry.

It has been a rough year for our nesting geese. The biggest problem was having a fox on the Island during the early part of the nesting process and I think that the fox discouraged two goose couples from building their nests. Then, the unthinkable happened. It looks as if the fox actually killed one of the male geese that was protecting a nesting female. We never found the goose remains so it's possible that the goose got away, but there was enough evidence to assume that even if the goose was not consumed, it probably didn't survive the attack.

The widowed female is still on the nest under the deck. The only other active nest on the Island was the one down near where the old treehouse was. Sadly that nest was inundated by the flood waters and had to be abandoned. I thought that we were down to only one nest when I realized that a new nest had been recently built right under my living room window behind the ladders. I was a little surprised by the late start of this nest but maybe it means that the fox is now gone. We only have two nests now, but the other nestless couples are still hanging around and their behavior is so mysterious. Yesterday I witnessed what I thought was going to be some kind of goose-acide. The poor widowed mommy goose was sitting on her eggs not bothering anyone, when another goose came and stood over her and started to violently dig it's beak into the base of her neck . It looked to me as if the attacking goose was going for the jugular vein with the way it was digging into the other's feathers. The weird thing was that the sitting goose did not try to resist and quietly sat there as it was being pushed off of it's nest. I went to get the camera and when I came back, the abuse had stopped and there hasn't been any harassment since.

The variety of birds that I'm seeing is astounding. Crows, blackbirds, grackles, cedar wax-wings, ruby-crowned kinglet, bluejays, cardinals, Carolina wrens, vultures, cormorants, robins, coot, mergansers, wood ducks, hawks, mallards, geese, herons, kingfisher, eagle, osprey, several warblers, four types of woodpeckers, chicadees, titmice, house finches and goldfinches.

Sunday -- April 22, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 5.0     Water Temperature: 50

The ferry is OPEN! Happy Earth Day!!

Tuesday -- April 24, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 4.5     Water Temperature: 56

The bluebells are on their way out and the Island is still very muddy from the flood. When the river was at 8.4 feet, more than half of the Island is under water and there is a layer of fine silt wherever the waters encroached.

When the river was at it's crest I was able to push the canoe dock out past the tree line so that it could go out with the receding waters, one less chore for the workfest, though we still need to attach the ramp. Before I launched it I made the changes that Stan suggested. Stan had the great idea of rearranging the squares of the dock so that there would be an open area in the middle of the dock, kind of like a slip, so that it would be easier to get in and out of a boat. If you were at the meeting in February you will remember that Stan made a replica of our dock with Legos to explain his idea, (complete with little model canoes). So, from now on, the canoe dock shall be known as the Lego dock. It was not easy rearranging all of those squares but my hope is that it will be a big improvement to that dock.

Stan and I also launched the captain's float a week ago. That was not a simple job either. We had Stan's magic "grip hoist", but we needed an anchor on the tree that was hanging over the river about twenty feet from the shore. That might not sound difficult but the wind that day was blowing with 25 MPH gusts, so getting to, and staying next to, that tree branch proved very exhausting. Once we had the pulley dangling from the tree, it was just a matter of slowly inching the dock forward until it was floating again. It took all afternoon, but now most of the docks are out in the river and the only one left to send at the workfest will be the swimming dock, hooray!

Friday -- April 27, 2018
Water Level at Little Falls: 5.1     Water Temperature: 56

I just had to close the ferry again because of the rising river. The river will continue to rise tomorrow so I told the relief caretakers not to come down, so the ferry will be closed tomorrow too.

As far as Sunday and the workfest, it looks like the workfest will go on as planned regardless of the fact that the river might still be a little high.

Happy Arbor Day! I guess here at Sycamore Island Arbor Day is "Sycamore Day". Yea for trees!

If you plan to come to the workfest I recommend that you park at the lower parking lot since the trail from the upper parking lot is still somewhat blocked. If the lot is full, I say park on the grass along the parkway.

I'm still getting used to not having a trail and a pedestrian bridge. Right now, I'm parking in the upper lot and bushwhacking along a deer path down to the parkway. Trying to cross the parkway is the scary part. The last thing that I want is for someone to stop and set off a chain reaction and a pile-up. Usually I pretend that I'm walking along the road until I see my chance to cross. In the mornings during rush hour though, crossing the parkway is impossible. The road is one-way and the cars are backed up all the way back to the beltway and there is not stop light or stop sign to create a break in the traffic. The afternoon rush is more manageable since there is a stop light down at Chain Bridge. Yesterday morning I contemplated crossing on the pedestrian bridge but on the OUTSIDE of the railing but decided to hop over the fence instead. It was a little too early in the morning for a high-wire act.

I'm trying to stay good-natured about all of this but the fact is, this closure is a royal pain in the ass for me and for all of the members of the Club. There is a bright side however. With the trail closed, people are going somewhere else to walk their dogs, so consequently there is a lot less dog poop and a lot fewer bags of dog poop littering the trail.