Onion River Exploration Project: Fairies and the Turtles they rode in on

A good day for Fairies

Day 13 (8/31/15)

We haven’t been able to kayak nearly as much as we would have liked to this summer so when the opportunity presented itself we took advantage of it. We had to deliver some art work to Fond du Lac in the morning and were babysitting our grandson Wade so we took our time and took in the present exhibit. We then went to the mall to see if they had a play area for Wade to run off some energy before making the hour long drive back home. They didn’t exactly have a play area but he did manage to run around a little and ride on some coin operated cars. As we were leaving we noticed a Hardees with a play area. We were getting a little peckish so we decided to stop. Wade was in heaven. Not only was there a great ball pit but it had tunnels and slides and best of all other children. Not surprisingly he did not want to leave. After eventually getting him out of the ball pit we started for home. His mom was already home by the time we got back to the grove so we dropped him off. It was still early afternoon so we switched over to the “Yakhauler” and headed out to Waldo Millpond. As I have mentioned before in earlier posts, my wife Eileen has been working on a project building and photographing Fairy environments as we Kayak. She had a couple of new buildings to try out and Waldo seemed like the perfect place to do it. It is a very shallow flowage lake with a lot of dead snags and rocks sticking up above the surface, ideal environments for fairies. She found a site almost immediately after leaving the landing. While she set up I explored the area. A couple of years ago while kayaking on Hingham Flowage we had come across a murmuration of small fish which we found out later were probably baby bullheads. Well we found another one today but this one wasn’t as easy to video tape. The water was to murky and whenever I got close enough to film them they would move away so eventually I gave up and went looking for easier subjects. Most of the time when you are kayaking, turtles will plop into the water as soon as they see you coming but today they seemed content to let you almost glide right up to them so while Eileen set up and photographed her environments I photographed turtles. So we slowly worked our way around the outside of the lake with Eileen looking for new environments and me looking for turtles. We scared up a Blue Heron while we were moseying around the lake but never really got a chance to photograph it. We never did get a chance to go up the river which is usually our favorite part. When we did get up to the other end we figured out why the Boat landing was so clear of the scum that usually collects there in the late summer. It had all blown up to the other end. The end where the river comes in was bank to bank crust. As I paddled through it I felt as if I was in an airplane flying over the canopy of a tropical rainforest. It was starting to get late though and we knew that the wind was going to be in our face going back so we meandered our way up along the other bank and back to the Yakhauler. Another good day at Waldo.