It was just before 2pm and we were finally ready to set off on our final 15 nautical mile leg to Mystic. I was feeling prepared and organized when Joe offhandedly said: “You have one final test for today—visibility.”
“Hunh? What?” I asked.
He pointed to the thick fog that had just rolled across the horizon. Five minutes earlier you could see all the way across the Great Salt Pond and past the channel into Block Island Sound. Now you could barely see the other end of the pond!
It seemed to be burning off, so we warily got underway. Luckily, the fogged rolled out almost as quickly as it rolled in, and by the time we were out of the pond it was smooth sailing (literally).
We used a combination of paper charts and Navionics software to plot our course toward Fishers Island and the Mystic River beyond.
The sky was crystal clear and we had barely left the shore of Block before we could see the Rhode Island shoreline in the distance. Now, this was the kind of sailing I signed up for, I smiled at Joe.
The only hurdle was that Joe didn’t want to fly the main for fear that it would get stuck again. So, we had to sail with just the headsail and the mizzen. Or as the sailors call it—“jib and jigger.” Luckily, the wind was on our side (finally!) so sailing without the main was actually quite lovely, it just meant we couldn’t go terribly fast—we averaged about 4 knots, when I was hoping to make 7. We had left pretty late, so making it to Mystic before sunset was going to be difficult, at best.
The steering was nice and smooth again and I was able to comfortably take my place at the helm. Joe made us tea, and we ate ham and cheese roll ups for a late lunch while cruising across the Sound.
At some point, when we were about 3-4 miles off the coast, the depth meter started sounding its alarm. It read 6 feet of water… 5 feet of water… 4 feet of water… and continued to go down. We need 6 feet of water and we were approaching that number. I called to Joe who was down below.
“What’s happening? Is there a shoal here? Why am I running out of water? Check the chart!”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Joe checked the chart, which said we had over a hundred feet of water below us. I checked the Navionics and it said the same thing.
“When in doubt,” Joe said “Use your eyes! Look around. If there were a shoal, or the water was getting shallower, you’d be able to see it in the surface of the water. Remember that first day–you could see the shoal off Martha’s Vineyard because the color of the water and the waves changed.”
We looked around. The water was completely consistent.
Which could only mean one thing… the instrument was wrong. Seriously?! I thought. Everything was going so well and now the Fathometer is broken! Joe turned it off, to give us a break from the beeping. I resigned myself to having to rely on the charts in order to know the depth below us, which was alarming as we were approaching a notoriously challenging river.
Joe went down below and puttered around for a bit. After awhile, the Fathometer came back on and he emerged to look at the reading it. 103 feet. Just right. What sort of voodoo had he done to fix this thing? As he explained, he pulled the transducer cable from the back of the gauge, cleaned it, and reset it. Like I said, some kind of voodoo!
By the time we had our eyes on Watch Hill, (which is surrounded by rocks and shallow areas) everything was back to working normally. Phew. You really do need to know how to fix things on a boat if you’re going to sail one!
As beautiful as the weather was (and it was really beautiful, we sailed most of the afternoon without our jackets on) we kept hearing reports of dangerous conditions coming to our area Friday and Saturday over the VHF. It was October 10th, Hurricane Michael had made a devastating landfall in Florida, and the ripple effects would be hitting our area in the next 24-48 hours. As the sun got lower in the sky, I could start to feel the weather changing.
Joe noticed it, too. But he knew it was changing faster than I realized. Years of sailing in San Francisco Bay had given Joe a great education in the ways of fog. Without a word he calmly moved from stern to bow lowering the mizzen and headsail. At first I couldn’t see because he was standing in my way making up the sails. And then he moved and I realized, there was nothing to see. Except the fog!
