We were heading out East Passage of Narragansett Bay as the fog began to roll in. It had been a pleasant summer morning, but the breeze was from the south and laden with moisture that began to condense into fog over the cool waters of Rhode Island Sound. We found R2 that marks the end of the channel and then turned east toward the Elizabeth Islands in southern Massachusetts. Soon, visibility was down to 50 feet, and our boat was 45 feet long. We were motor sailing blind. The chartplotter, radar and AIS were all on and doing their jobs so we knew where we were and what was around us, which included about a dozen other boats. The VHF was busy with boats acknowledging each others’ position, course and speed as indicated by AIS. This was very like flying a plane on instruments, except we were going 7 knots instead of 300 knots. It was eerie and damp and focused our minds like almost no other sailing experience. When we were young, before we could afford radar and before AIS, we used to navigate in fog with dead reckoning and by using the depth sounder to follow depth contours on the paper charts. RDF helped but was not very accurate and constant vigilance was the name of the game. Then along came Loran for public use and we had our first real electronic position finder. It was complex and hard to use at first, but amazing. And then SatNav, which was slow and not great for in-the-moment fixes, but very helpful. With the advent of GPS in the late Eighties, electronic charting and more affordable radar, the world of navigation changed. Suddenly we knew where we were at all times and could confirm the GPS data with live visuals from the radar. AIS is the icing on this cake and makes sailing in fog, or any time, really, much safer and more practical. Four hours after leaving Narragansett Bay, we turned around the entrance buoy to the Cuttyhunk mooring field without seeing it and then turned to the narrow channel that leads to the inner harbor. The first actual visual sighting we had for the whole trip was the light tower at the end of the jetty. As Capt. Jack Aubury said in Master and Commander, circa 1804, “Fascinating modern world we live in.” I, for one, will never take it for granted.
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