Fog Glorious Fog
Wednesday 9th September 2020
“Patchy fog becoming dense in the late morning and afternoon. Visibility variable to less than one quarter mile” … so went the most up to date forecast this morning. At Jewel island there was no evidence of the bits between the patches and with no improvement expected we decided to head out and left the anchorage around 8.15 am. I could spend the rest of this chapter whining about fog and lobster pots … it might be quite cathartic … but I’ll try and stick to the positives.
When we upgraded our navigational electronics after buying Cotinga we chose to go with a Simrad system because the radar got rave reviews. We have had some problems with the radar dome leaking water, which lead to replacements in 2015 and 2017, but the system functions really well. Out in the fog today visibility was less than 100 yards most of the time but we could clearly pick up other vessels, navigational buoys and land. Despite essentially no wind, the sea state was quite bumpy, but the engine worked fine and we seem to have overcome the issues with dirty fuel in the main tank. There has been no evidence of water or any contamination from the main tank coming through to the first fuel filter (water separator), so that’s good. Although todays trip was only 18 nautical miles we treated it like an offshore / over-night passage and wore harnesses in the cockpit. We know exactly where we are and what direction we are going from the chart plotter, which has the radar (or weather conditions) overlaid. We also had a back-up GPS pre-programmed with waypoints in case our main system went down for any reason. This was total navigation by instruments, but the journey itself went fine as we peered into the mist trying to spot pots before we ran them over. It wasn’t very comfortable and we ended up getting pretty wet, but it only took us three hours to reach the anchorage just north of Biddeford Pool.
The only real issues we faced today were related to anchoring. Firstly, a low voltage alarm went off on the instruments whilst we were still at Jewel. This happened when I started pulling up the anchor (to take the “snubber” off) before the engine was started. I guess the windlass draws quite a lot of power and robbed the instruments of adequate voltage. Then when we came into Biddeford we had an AIS collision warning alarm went off whilst we were anchoring. This is the first time that has ever happened and it may have originated with a vessel we were close to in the harbor that still had its AIS system up and running even though it was at anchor. I’m guessing they had an automated exclusion zone around them and when we entered that zone it sent an alarm system. In any event it is somewhat reassuring that the system works! (I should add that we were never in danger of hitting another vessel, you do get close whilst positioning yourself to be clear when anchored.) Then we had a depth scare once we were settled as our depth sounder was jumping around from 10ft to 8 ft. Our draft is 6 ft and we knew we were one hour past low on a rising tide but we were unsure how far it might drop in the next cycle and why it kept fluctuating so wildly. We ended up pulling up and re-anchoring only to have a similar thing happen. Gloria, being the smart lady she is, suggested we plumb the depth (yes we actually have a lead and plumb line) and it came back clearly consistent with the higher number. We now think that we have seaweed under the vessel that is messing with the depth gauge. Having convinced ourselves we are safe we switched off the unit and had lunch!
Mike
43 27.158 N, 70 21.147 W
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