Sailing in Fog
Wednesday October 21, 2020
It was foggy when we got up this morning—more or less as expected. Then it started to rain heavily—not as expected. What’s with weather forecasting these days?
We set off with Oxford as our destination. When we got into the deeper waters of the bay we could see the ghostly outlines of a large vessel. As we got closer we could see that there were about 6 large vessels in the channel. Most of these turned out to be anchored but it wasn’t always easy to tell. Because there was wind we started to sail. The direction of the wind was pretty unfavorable—directly out of the south. Of course, that’s where we needed to go, so we were forced to tack back and forth down the bay. It seemed to me that as the wind speed picked up, the boat went faster but the fog got thicker. When the wind went light, the boat slowed down but the fog became less dense. It’s possible that I was imagining all this. Staring into the fog can do some weird things to your thinking...
Eventually, the wind went so light that we weren’t making any reasonable progress. So it was back to motor-sailing. Each time the wind strengthened, we tried to sail but it never lasted long. After six and a half hours of travel, we are anchored off Oxford in a river called the Tred Avon (a tributary of the Choptank River).
The most notable occurrence was that Mike noticed on the AIS system a vessel about a mile ahead of us called ‘Galileo’. (It wasn’t actually visible in the fog). Based on its width, he reckoned that it was a catamaran. Further, it seemed likely that this was the ‘Galileo’ that had been part of the 2017 Caribbean 1500 Rally. We spoke to them on the radio and indeed it was the same boat. However VHF communication wasn’t good enough to have much of a conversation with them – we aren’t sure why. Another example of “bumping into” boaters you have met before (hopefully not in a literal sense).
Gloria
38 41.734 N, 76 10.315 W
No comments:
Post a Comment