Kayaking at Cowan Lake

Tuesday
The temperature was on the rise again today, but it had been relatively cool over night, so we headed up to Cowan lake to go kayaking after breakfast, to try and beat the hottest time of day. Roger had been wanting to go kayaking on the Little Miami River, but last night I was checking the water level online, and people’s recommendation in the Facebook local paddling page, and we decided it is probably a bit low at present, and we would end up scraping a lot, and maybe even walking in places, so changed our minds to the lake instead. I had read that the American Lotus flowers were beginning to bloom, and they are always beautiful to see. The first beautiful thing we saw, however, were the beautiful coloured clouds in my top Blip. From my research on line, I believe this to be a circumhorizontal arc, sometimes misleadingly referred to as a fire rainbow, “an optical phenomenon belonging to the family of ice halos formed by the refraction of sunlight in plate-shaped ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, typically in actual cirrus or cirrostratus clouds.” “Fire rainbows” are most common in the middle of the day (late morning to early afternoon, while Sun dogs are most common later in the afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky. We had a great kayak, paddling first across the lake to the inlet by the campground where there is a large bed of Lotus flowers, and then paddling down to the end of the lake, where there are some more. While down that end of the lake we noticed a designated kayak entry dock which we didn’t know existed. We’ve always put in at the marina, because that’s where we rented from before we got our own kayaks! There was a nice grassy area around it with several picnic areas, so once we were back on dry land and had loaded the kayaks onto the car, we drove over there to have our picnic. As you can see from my collage, there was a sail boat out, as well as several pontoon boats, and a few fishing boats. One thing not so evident today was the bird life - other than a few great blue herons and cormorants in flight, we didn’t see many today.