Fog

by Craig Moodie

The fog hanging in the trees after the rain the other morning reminded me of the scene in Into the Trap when Eddie and Briggs are befogged on Greenhead Island. I have mixed feelings about fog.  As a sailor I worry about it, just the way Eddie’s dad says that staying ashore is the best tack to take when the fog rolls in.

But it also appeals to me because it transforms the world into a place of phantoms and mystery. I’ve always be thrilled by the spooky quality of fog. I’ve also been lucky to have escaped some of the dangers fog has obscured from me.

I’ve seen fog so thick while codfishing in the Great South Channel, sixty miles into the Atlantic off Cape Cod, that you could throw a stone over the rail and it would disappear before it began its downward arc. If you looked through the pilothouse windows of our thirty-five foot boat, the bow would be a blurred V shape vanishing into a dense gray wall. But if you went on deck and looked straight upward you could see a lens of milky blue sky. The fog was that shallow. In the summer, it was almost always there, courtesy of the cold Labrador Current interacting with the warmer Gulf Stream.

One night we were steaming out to the fishing grounds and I had the watch. The time was around two o’clock in the morning, and I was steering through darkness made even denser by the fog, what fishermen call “a thick of fog.” I kept our course using the radar and the loran. Without the instruments, we would have been running blind—like driving down a highway with your eyes closed.

I kept watching the sweep of the radar on the orange screen, and soon I saw a target a few miles ahead: a mark on the screen about the size of a kernel of rice. I knew the blip most likely indicated a dragger—a vessel that could be hundred-feet or more that towed a large net across the seafloor to catch codfish, flounder, and other fish. Though it was a bigger boat, you always gave way: When a dragger was towing, it wouldn’t bear off for the QE II.

The target did not move position as we steamed along, so I knew that we were on a collision course. I flipped the autopilot off and gripped the wheel. We were closing fast. I switched the radar to a shorter range to see the target better, and a tingle of tension crackled through me. I peered through the window through the blackness ahead.

One of the shortcomings of radar was that at its center was a blotch of interference called sea clutter that covered targets when they got within close range. I saw the target approaching the clutter—and watched it disappear into it. I spun the wheel to veer onto the course opposite the dragger’s. By now my heart was thundering and my hands quivered. What would my skipper think if I were to wake him by saying, “Hey, Rick! I think we’re about to hit a dragger.”?

I unlatched the hook of the hauling door beside me and slid the door open. I leaned out to peer into the fog, my face instantly wet with the droplets pouring past—and recoiled when I saw what was passing: the high black hull of the dragger, its work deck bathed in garish fog-smeared light from the powerful decklights mounted on the back of the pilothouse. We were so close that I saw a crewman in orange oilskins bent over at some task. He didn’t look up, didn’t notice us. I could read the name of the brand of oilskins he was wearing on his suspenders: Grundens. I could feel the pulse of the dragger’s diesel engine. I stood looking up at the hull passing, my mouth open like a codfish’s. I blinked, looked back at the radar. When I turned to the hauling door again, black fog had swallowed the dragger.

I eased the hauling door shut and brought us back on course.