The Other Side of the Fog
by Tom Tripp
The house I currently live in sits on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound (unfortunately I don't own it; only rent). One of the best things about it is that when the weather changes, I am the first to know, since most of our weather arrives from the west, which means from over the water. Before the recent heat wave, we went through a long, three-week period of oppressive gray, wet weather. For me, the weather was dominated by the fog that hung like a heavy, wet curtain between me and the water.
Fog creeps into a Vancouver marina
The day the fog arrived, I noticed that the far Connecticut shore, some 15 miles away, began to fade in the mist. When I looked up again from my work, it was gone, but so was any remaining distinction between sky and sea. And since I live high on that cliff, and my view normally looks down to the sea, it looked as though the fog had taken over all sky, sea and earth and that I was sitting on some dark, wet pinnacle in the clouds.
Maybe it's living in the northeast, but it seems like fog has played a role in many of my ocean-going adventures. When I was in college, my roommate and I were sailing on the Sound at New London when the fog just rolled in and the wind died. Within minutes a deep thrum-thrum-thrum came from somewhere in the fog and we started to panic. Our little wooden boat with its old Dacron sails would never show up on some commercial boat's radar. In the fog, we couldn't determine the exact direction of the sound but it seemed to be coming from our starboard side, from the south. The problem was that there were big ferries from Long Island and even bigger nuclear submarines that routinely came in and out of the nearby Thames River.
We listened to the deep vibration get closer and closer and then pass close off the bow of our becalmed sailboat. We never saw what was in the fog that afternoon but the wake from whatever it was nearly swamped us. We broke out the paddles and swung our boat about 120 degrees to port, figuring we'd hit the beach eventually.
Many years later, I was aboard my own boat, Sunbeam, coming back down the West Passage of Narragansett Bay after a trip up to Fall River. We were headed down to Newport but wanted to go down the West Passage so we could go by the old Quonset Point Naval Air Station, which is now an industrial park, but which had been an active naval base when I trolled for stripers in my grandfather's small boat in the 1960s.
Just as we came abeam of the old carrier piers, the Bay to the south disappeared in a fog wave. The radar was up and running already so it wasn't an immediate problem, but I knew it would get a little dicey when we turned East just north of Jamestown to cross over to Newport. The East Passage is the main north-south route for big tankers headed up to Providence. After turning east, we crept along trying to give ourselves as much time as possible to see and avoid any conflicts.
As we cleared the radar shadow of Jamestown Island, I saw a huge radar return to the south and the ARPA function quickly calculated a northbound course and speed of 13 knots for the target. It had to be a truly big tanker to have such a huge radar return on the screen. I decided to sit tight and let it pass safely in front of us. The fog was condensing on the plastic windscreens of my flybridge, so I had to send someone out to the bow just to get an extra 20 or 30 feet of visibility. When the ship crossed our bow, the fog literally darkened, as though a black hole was crossing our path. Even then, we never actually saw the ship, only its shadow in the fog.
My last encounter with fog at sea happened during a trip from Port Jefferson on Long Island, out to Block Island. It was a beautiful sunny August day on Long Island Sound and Sunbeam was cruising nicely at about 20 knots, eastbound toward The Race, the narrow passage through which all the water of Long Island Sound passes in and out with the tides. The fast-moving waters have scoured deep holes in The Race, where the depths can quickly drop to more than 300 feet.
We turned southeast after passing through The Race and followed a GPS-derived course toward Block Island. It was about a 15-mile leg and there were several other boats around us also heading in that direction. My eye-height above the sea surface aboard Sunbeam was about 13 feet, which meant that I should be able to see the hills of Block Island at about 8 or 9 miles. I could see it on the radar, but as I looked out at the horizon there was just a thin white line where the sky met the sea.
As the distance to the island continued to close I was more and more puzzled about why I couldn't see it. I hadn't seen any fog all day so I wasn't thinking about it, but the thin white line thickened the closer we got. At less than 3 miles from the island, I suddenly realized that I must be looking at a nearly solid wall of fog, behind which, somewhere, was Block Island. It was, in fact, a solid wall and in just a few seconds our world turned from sunny and clear to damp, dark and confining. I yanked the throttles back instinctively, as though I was afraid of hitting a wall. It was that sudden and thick.
A few deep breaths, a reassuring look at the radar, and I moved the throttles forward again, still on course for the island that appeared ahead of us only on radar. We plodded on toward the sea buoy, which I could see on the radar, just where it was supposed to be, but I wondered how we would navigate the entrance to the harbor. A second shock then, as we suddenly exited the dark fog into perfectly clear sunny weather right at the sea buoy. I turned to look at the fog-wall just yards behind our stern and then we negotiated the entrance to the Salt Pond. As I think about it now, I realize I'd never before actually made it to the other side of the fog.
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