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Gardner 05-22-20, Some notes of interest and a decent meg


Bone Daddy

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After a two month Covid lockdown hiatus, I finally managed to hit the river again yesterday. Loaded up the truck and headed out to Gardner. I wanted to spend some more quality time at the same spot where I found a ground sloth phalanx on a previous trip - I was hoping to find more of that sloth. This spot is a little further away than my usual Gardner spots, so it sees less pressure and I suspected some megs might be hiding there because I kept finding broken frags and lots of other shark species.

A couple of notes -

1) The long dirt road leading to the boat ramp has been resurfaced by the county. It's a much more pleasant ride and a lot less bumpy now. As recently as my last trip in March, that road was pretty darn rough and you would vibrate your vehicle to death if you drove over 5 or 10mph. The county laid down some new gravel and re-graded it. It's much better now and won't tear up your suspension.

 

2) When we arrived yesterday morning, the USGS Zolfo gauge said the height was 4 feet and the flow was 52cfs. That gauge is also a pretty good indicator for what to expect at Gardner. It was very low. The lowest I have personally seen it there. Long stretches were too shallow to paddle, so be prepared to do a lot of walking and pulling the kayak/canoe behind you. Also, the low flow rate was making the water very soupy and cloudy. Visibility was poor, even in the shallow spots. It wasn't a full-blown algae bloom yet, but getting there. When the gauge height starts getting below 4.25, then it's almost too low to hunt. Personally, my sweet spot is between 4.5 and 5.0. If you are going to hunt Gardner, keep the gauge in mind and adjust your hunting accordingly. Diving or snorkeling in that soup would have been unproductive.

 

So, after some paddling and a lot of walking, we (my wife and I), arrived at the hunting spot. I spent about 5 hours there and probably turned over about 75-100 sifters worth of gravel. Some other hunters had already hit the spot, because I saw shovel marks and spoil piles. That explains why I wasn't finding as much as I had hoped. Even being more remote and seeing less pressure, this spot still gets hunted. I really need to invest in a motor to get back and forth to the really distant places.

 

I found a nice handful of smaller teeth, a nice large thresher with good color, and one decent megalodon. My first meg since 2018. I was pretty happy about that, since I seemed to be cursed lately with megs. I couldn't buy a meg to save my life over the last two seasons. I found a few half-megs, but this was my first intact decent one in quite a while. It has a little bit of root damage, but is 95% complete and about 2 inches. Not spectacular, but it broke the snide.

 

We only saw one small gator and one turtle. Lots of birds were everywhere and there were a lot of butterflies fluttering around the wildflowers - a lot of yellow wildflowers (coreopsis), so that was pretty to see along the banks. We also saw a great blue heron catch and swallow a small snake. That was pretty neat to see.

 

My wife is still downloading the photos, so I will post those later. My back still hurts, but we had a great time and enjoyed getting out. Surprisingly, for a friday on a holiday weekend, the ramp and river were pretty quiet. We only saw a small handful of other people the entire day. I suspect this weekend will be busier.

PS - a couple of hours after we left, a storm hit the Peace basin and the river jumped a foot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Congratulations on the Meg!  Glad you made it out there before the friday night rain.  I was out Thursday and found the river low and slow.  A lot of meg pieces, but no whole ones to talk about.  Looking forward to seeing your photos.  I hope to get back out next week but am worried about the weather reports - widespread thunderstorms are predicted for just about every afternoon.

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Glad you were able to get out there again! A good fossil hunt after all this isolation time really does wonders for the body and mind. :) 

 

Can't wait to see your photos! :popcorn:

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.  -Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't. -Bill Nye (The Science Guy)

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Here are a couple of photos. From now on, I am bringing on my own camera on these trips. My wife is a photographer with a good camera, and she takes hundreds of photos on each trip, but it takes her weeks to go through all the photos and get them uploaded to the cloud from her camera. I'll grow old and die waiting for those photos. So, I am going to start taking my own photos again.

 

First photo, my meager haul from a day of shoveling.

 

Second photo, the river about 100 yards from our hunting spot. Notice how low the water is. That is not going to last much longer.

 

 

05-22-20-Gardner.JPG

05-22-20-Gard-1.jpeg

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On 5/23/2020 at 9:55 AM, Bone Daddy said:

a nice large thresher with good color,

 

GREAT !!! GREAT trip report... covers lots of observations and important aspects of hunting Gardner...  Thanks for taking the time...

 

Thresher???? thresher... scarcer than hen's teeth... Where is that photo?2013Jan3rdGiantThresherMerge.thumb.jpg.dad41b46edca027c2f189172f7cb125e.jpg2016Dec14thThresher.thumb.jpg.2bf6df5fde93588b58649e1b6ab56fd1.jpg5eca9756e6ece_AlopiasgrandisMergeTxt.thumb.jpg.9160efdecbbd2b565d4b12949bf78234.jpg

The White Queen  ".... in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast"

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8 minutes ago, Shellseeker said:

 

GREAT !!! GREAT trip report... covers lots of observations and important aspects of hunting Gardner...  Thanks for taking the time...

 

Thresher???? thresher... scarcer than hen's teeth... Where is that photo?2013Jan3rdGiantThresherMerge.thumb.jpg.dad41b46edca027c2f189172f7cb125e.jpg2016Dec14thThresher.thumb.jpg.2bf6df5fde93588b58649e1b6ab56fd1.jpg5eca9756e6ece_AlopiasgrandisMergeTxt.thumb.jpg.9160efdecbbd2b565d4b12949bf78234.jpg

 

I must have misidentified the "thresher" - I get my sharks confused. Outside of megalodons, they all look pretty similar to me and I get them confused. The "thresher" I was referring to is the smaller tooth next to the meg in the photo. What kind is that? I looked through my box of teeth and I have actually found a couple others of that size, so it wasn't the biggest of that type that I have ever found - but it's close.

 

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7 minutes ago, Bone Daddy said:

The "thresher" I was referring to is the smaller tooth next to the meg in the photo. What kind is that?

 

That tooth, I think, is a very nice Hemipristis,  upper tooth I think.  Let's see what others say...  Jack

The White Queen  ".... in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast"

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56 minutes ago, Shellseeker said:

 

That tooth, I think, is a very nice Hemipristis,  upper tooth I think.  Let's see what others say...  Jack

 

Uppers and lowers, front and back, that is where I get confused. I had thought about Snaggletooth, but then most of the Snaggles I find look like this :

snaggle-a.jpg.8738131214f9f0c18bf21958ec5f8a24.jpg

 

Or, they look like this (the one in the lower right in my hand) :teeth-3.JPG.010a2762ccf67e601c991bfdb431681a.JPG

 

Coincidentally, that last photo is my haul from that same day where Josh and I bumped into you in the field at that dry land site.  :)

 

 

EDIT : after consulting some reference materials, you are correct Jack. This is a hemi. (me thinks)....  I'm still never quite sure. LOL.

 

 

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A few more shots. The wife snapped a couple of photos of me while I was sifting - she's sneaky like that.

 

Can you recognize the spot I am in from these photos? Somebody else hunts that same spot. I am not sure who. It might be somebody reading this. If so - get outta my spot!  :D

No seriously, get out. :ninja:  ;)

 

05-22-20-Gard-2.thumb.jpg.7e8adb0e2ed48298dc488a00b3b3eda1.jpg

 

05-22-20-Gard-3.thumb.jpg.e569b27b8ee0fda4929207b521110098.jpg

 

05-22-20-Gard-4.thumb.jpeg.971fd187faa4ec1f840acaed7705f21f.jpeg

 

05-22-20-Gard-5.thumb.jpeg.d8b78376531b1a473e8a06ff5fdee47c.jpeg05-22-20-Gard-meg.thumb.jpeg.2c61735966d2f09ba363115c59c78ad8.jpeg

 

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Thanks for the photos and report!  Sorry that Meg came up missing that corner.  I know the sudden rush of seeing a nice size one in the sifter and the disappointment of finding it just not quite complete.

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18 hours ago, PODIGGER said:

Thanks for the photos and report!  Sorry that Meg came up missing that corner.  I know the sudden rush of seeing a nice size one in the sifter and the disappointment of finding it just not quite complete.

 

Yeah, it's a shame the corner is missing, but it's close enough to count for me. That's how desperate I was to break that dry spell. The last time this happened, I saw a pretty meg in my sifter and it turned out to be just a half-tooth when I pulled it out. You can see it in the photo below. It's on the lower-right. Laying in my screen, it was half-obscured by clay and gravel, so I only saw the good half. My heart sank when I picked it up and cleaned it off. LOL.

 

gard-swag-sm.JPG

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