Q's End: Licence to Travel: Terrifying Times

(Wednesday July 20 - Dist: 21.6 mi; TTT: 4:30 hrs)

FOG, FOG and MORE FOG

It was a beautiful morning with the sun shining and the water calm (see adjacent photo). Visibility in the harbor was good..... but as you can see in the top photo there was literally a wall of fog at the mouth of the inlet. There was nothing in the forecast about fog and boats, including the tour operators for whale watching, fishing, etc., were going out. So we followed one boat into the blanket....then he was gone. Fortunately we had our course route on the chart plotter and the radar unit was operating normally.

As we made the turn north about 1.5 miles off shore, 2 targets appeared on the radar, one of which appeared to be on a collision course with us. I naturally altered our course and slowed down even more. All of a sudden we heard a horn and then out of the fog a shrimp boat, dragging its nets came charging across our port bow. It scared the hell out of Linda and I. Despite steering away from the radar blip and slowing down it was still too close for comfort. You see visibility was only about 100-200 feet. He was way closer than I would have allowed on a calm, clear day.

We immediately decided to head back to Cape May. Our only means of navigation were the chartplotter and radar unit. As we neared the buoy outside of the inlet, we could clearly here the bell but were never able to actually see the buoy. As we got even closer to the inlet we could hear boat engines long before we could see anything and then sometimes we never did see the boat. Once inside it was clear again.

Linda and I decided that we would wait for the fog to dissipate. We waited for 4 hours and it only got worse as you can see from the photo taken in mid afternoon. We packed it in, returned to our slip which was fortunately still available and walked into town for a beer and lunch.

Well it is now Thursday morning and the fog is still around. We will be staying another day unless the fog miraculously lifts by early afternoon. In the meantime here are a few photos of the waterfront around Cape May Harbor.