Two minds: 
1) the IOException that gets thrown on the next line will probably be logged, so double logging the exception trace would probably be confusing.
2) Is the log.error even necessary?  Probably not, but I'd like to see something in case we have to trace an error.

Basically, I'm maintaining the status quo, which was to log that the error happened and re-throw as IOException.  I'd like to leave this the way it is or address in a future PR.