They sometimes call this month “Fogust” out here on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and it’s been living up to the reputation so far this year. Our radar has gotten a good workout from the moment we crawled out of Bull Harbour all the way back down into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We’ve had wind and fog, rain and fog, lightning and fog… even, sometimes, sun and fog, as the upper layer peels back and bathes the boat in a stream of brilliance from the heavens even as the surrounding water is obscured by thick, pearly walls.
Fog can be picturesque. There’s something supernatural about being completely cut off from the visual world when you’re inside a thick fog bank. If it’s not so thick, it can perform strange and wondrous tricks with views of already spectacular scenery… decorating a wooded slope with streaming tendrils, torn apart by the trees, gracing an otherwise pedestrian-looking rock with a crown of fluff, or merely rendering an entire vista in soft relief, as if through a vaseline-smeared lens. And it has it’s own sort of terrain features: fog lines, fog banks, fog mountains, fog rivers, fog canyons. Once, in bright sunshine, we even saw a fog-bow.
But mostly it’s become an annoyance to us at this point. We’re out here, at least in part, for the scenery. And we can’t see it. We’ve had good sailing days and bad sailing days, but in the fog, good sailing becomes mediocre, and bad sailing, which otherwise would be tempered by the amazing spectacle of water, mountains, whales, and eagles, becomes miserable. It’s like being stuck in a sensory deprivation chamber–nothing but blank, undifferentiated whiteness at an unmeasurable distance. Without the steady visual cue of the horizon, my wife becomes even more susceptible to sea-sickness.
All that is just tourist whining, of course. The more serious problem is that fog makes sailing more dangerous. We lose much of our range of visual scanning for hazards on, and just beneath, the water. Deadheads and other semi-submerged obstacles appear out of nowhere. Reference points for navigation, including most marks, are unavailable.
Radar helps fill the gap with respect to large land masses and most other vessels, but it can prove as terrifying in its own way as the fog itself. Most radar users are familiar with the phenomena of “radar-assisted collisions,” perhaps most famously in the case of the Andrea Doria/Stockholm accident. Sometimes, knowing what’s out there is more dangerous than running blind.
One afternoon as we meandered along at four knots or so through a bright glowing fog bank, I squinted at the radar display trying to make out a wavering blotch it painted intermittently about one mile ahead on my port bow. Before the fog had thickened up, I had spotted a large trawler and a smaller sport fisherman in the vicinity, but this return didn’t look like either of them. The bearing was steady and the distance was decreasing, but I couldn’t hear any engine sounds… another sailboat? The way it was fading in and out, it didn’t seem unlikely. And if, like us, they had white sails and a white hull, they’d be particularly difficult to pick out in the mist.
I watched anxiously as the range continued to decrease. Three-quarters of a mile, a half-mile, a quarter-mile… still no visual contact. As the range dropped, my blood pressure increased. I called Mandy on deck to help scan for it. Eventually, still with no sighting, it dropped away along our port side and I lost it. Mandy went back below and I tried to get my thumping heart rate back to normal.
A few minutes later, I glanced at the radar again. The contact was dead astern of us, at one mile… and closing! I flipped around, though I knew I couldn’t possibly see it, and stared out into the fog so intently that I started imaging things… dark shapes just out of sight, the white flashes of a bow-wave.
Just then, it occured to me that the monotonous groan of the radome spinning over my head was beating out the theme to Jaws.
I never did find out what that particular blip was. But we have had plenty of close calls all along the coast similar to that.
What I think about most, though, was a tense ten minutes we had several years ago on a bright, sunny day in Mosquito Pass with not a shred of fog in sight. It was our very first passage through that picturesque, windy passage, and with our chart plotter running, depth-sounder sounding away, and all the relevant landmarks and navigational aids in plain sight, we anticipated no problems.
Then there was a loud “pop” from below, over the thrum of the diesel, and an acrid cloud of smoke drifted up out of the companionway. At the same moment, every electrical instrument on board went dead.
While Mandy scrambled below to fight any fires she might find, I was suddenly in an unfamiliar channel, notorious for currents and blind turns, without a depth reference or accurate position. A moment of panic passed quickly as I realized that an accurate chart was close at hand, and I could easily see all the channel markers and points along the passage. We made our way into Garrison Bay without further incident and found that the positive wire from the alternator had snapped off at the connector. Ten minutes with a crimper and spare connector and it was all fixed again.
But the rapidity with which all our modern instrumentation can be put out of commission, in the worst spots at the worst moments, has stayed with me. Fog forces reliance on those instruments. We carry spares and have alternatives, but some of these are simply inadequate for navigation in zero visibility in tight quarters. Fifty years ago, before GPS and radar, people simply didn’t put themselves in those positions. But we do now, and think little of it. Until something goes wrong.