We wanted to sail to Maine but had been warned about the fog. Several boaters told us they had been to Maine but “never saw it.” According to my Reeds Nautical Almanac, late August and September was the best time to avoid fog in Maine, so north we went.
Our first experience of being fogged in was at the east end of Long Island Sound. We woke to the sound of foghorns and ate breakfast while listening to Channel 16 as the boats lined up in the heavy fog. My sailing catamaran, SMAY , stayed safely anchored until visibility improved later in the morning. Then we went to Block Island, Newport and Nantucket before sailing through Cape Cod Canal to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Some mornings were hazy, and we made sure we were anchored before the nighttime fog arrived. And we had already learned something about the lovely lighthouses that dot the coast: They have foghorns.
From afar the sound is picturesque. But if you are anchored next to an active foghorn, good luck getting a good night’s sleep. North of Cape Cod, the air turned cooler and the water colder. The boats also changed: Everything commercial, even the smaller skiffs, had sheltered pilothouses.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, we tied up to the public dock at Prescott Park. This park would be a great place to visit in summer; you can walk down the pier and turn right to visit downtown or turn left to walk through the formal gardens. There we learned another hazard of venturing “Down East.” The owners of a significant powerboat tied up at the end of the pier that had hit a rock had been waiting weeks for their props to be repaired. If you screw up here, you hit hard Maine rock, not soft Florida sand.
Across the Piscataqua River, Maine beckoned. We started into a bad nor’easter—17-foot seas at the weather station on the Isle of Shoals as we motor-sailed past. This was another lesson: Had we waited 24 hours, the wind would have eased and swung, and we would have sailed a comfortable broad reach. But we still made it to Kennebunkport. President George H.W. Bush was in residence, and we watched the Secret Service motor past with his Donzi boat. When we left a couple of days later, there was the Donzi, with Bush standing on the bow casting a rod. As soon as I recognized it, I tacked away.
The ever-shifting clouds of billowing fog were disorienting, and the compass and the loran were the only way to locate anything.
At Boothbay Harbor, the local fish co-op had assembled a floating pier where you could walk up to a tank of lobsters, select the one you liked, walk farther for a piece of corn, and then eat it all at a picnic table at the end of the gently undulating pier. I decided that since I was in Maine, I ought to go for a swim. The water was so cold I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back out. But once I made it back to shore, I felt so good I briefly thought about going back in. The experience created a sense of profound respect for the lobstermen who fish these waters all year round.
We left to go farther Down East, aiming for Bar Harbor. That’s when the fog caught us. We had become accustomed to misty conditions. But this fog bank, a real Maine pea-souper, blew in on a breeze, catching SMAY offshore. I quickly calculated a fix and looked at the chart for a safe place to anchor. Having taken the United States Power Squadrons boating classes, I knew to rely on my compass.
The ever-shifting clouds of billowing fog were disorienting, and the compass and the loran were the only way to locate anything. Using the coordinates from the Reeds Nautical Almanac I was able to find a fixed green channel marker looming out of the fog just ahead of the port bow. The loran calculated the distance to the hazy structure at 0.17 nautical miles. Reeds only published marker coordinates for the main channel entrance. I didn’t want to risk sitting at an entrance marker. I knew the stiff breeze would tend to blow me out of the channel as the boat traveled between channel markers. And I had learned that hard Maine rocks waited outside the channel.
I devised a plan: Locate a buoy. Use the local chart to plot a compass course toward the next buoy. Set the autopilot to steer this new course, slowly moving forward on the new heading. Then look backward at the old buoy, using it to provide a visual reference to help minimize the wind-driven leeway. By using my handheld compass, I tried to maintain my relative bearing while looking back at the last marker. When the fog obscured it, we would switch to focusing on the heading for the next buoy, using the autopilot and main compass, and creep forward. I figured the autopilot would probably steer a more accurate compass course to where I hoped this next buoy would appear out of the wind-driven mist. Buoy by buoy, we made it into a pocket and anchored until the fog lifted the following day.
The fog was a challenge, but we made it to Bar Harbor and anchored at the head of the Somes Sound fjord in Acadia National Park. There, the next meteorological event caught us—the temperature dropped by 40 degrees. I was shocked to be facing frost in early September. I could see only one way to plot a course out of a cold front. We fled Maine the next morning, harnessing the chilly but fog-free north wind to blow us south toward warmer weather.
