By the end of December of 2012 the river water was cooling down but the quality of my finds was heating up.
I found my first turtle spurs. When you see a shape like this in your screen, you know it's something but you might not necessarily know what. Luckily, I always had the experts around me, usually Bill, Jack, and or Dave, to readily ID my finds.
But all that paddling! Generally we start by paddling upstream at least a mile and a half but usually more. Then we dig all day long in the water which was a whole new level of "demanding" for me. Then we have to paddle back downstream which might sound easy, with the current moving us swiftly along, but it isn't so. Low winter water levels in the Peace River equal very slow current; not much help with the paddle back.
I dreamed of having a trolling motor to attach to my kayak and poor Mike had to listen to all my bitching and moaning about it. He solved the problem by giving me a trolling motor for Christmas.
OMG! Joy! I immediately ran off to my computer to Google ways to attach it to my kayak.
Not easy.
Sometimes I wish I had fewer choices and this was one of those situations. It was Mike who, upon witnessing me making notes and sketches and cursing the men on YouTube for making things so difficult, told me point blank that I was over-thinking it. Use the KISS method. And so I did.
I made a basic, sturdy frame out of 2x4 scraps, bolted it right onto my 14' barge (I have NO fear about drilling into my kayak...above the waterline, that is), and the battery sits in the back well in a waterproof battery box. I use the kayak rudder for steering.
I felt a little silly the first time I lugged all that heavy gear to the water's edge, and it took some practice to get a working system, but I'm so spoiled now! And my fossiling friends are getting a little bit spoiled too...
This photo was taken by someone I was towing after a day of fossiling. I've been told it's a relaxing ride back there. I think I look a little serious in this photo but mostly I'm just trying to keep all the details in check. There's a trick to using this setup in the extremely shallow water of the Peace River. I can only set the propeller so high before it's not even in the water any more, but at it's highest setting it still gets banged up by rocks and mired in the sand. The water weeds are a whole other headache and I finally found that the best way to clear the prop is by cutting the weeds with the little blade on a wine bottle opener. As I come upon shallow areas, I lean as far to the left as I can, thus raising the prop as high as possible and when the water is deeper, I lean to the right, lowering the prop for more efficiency. My Wilderness Systems Tarpon 140 is extremely stable so I don't think I could flip it even if I tried.
Trolling means I have more energy for digging.
The meg on the right is my Arcadia beauty. The meg on the left is only a fragment but it was still exciting to find it. The excitement comes from seeing just the root of it exposed and thinking maybe you found an huge intact meg! I'm still waiting to actually find a huge intact meg...
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