the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of
fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on
us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and
everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog
factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the
two weeks before and had sent their whole output in one consignment. We
had just passed our inner buoy when the fog struck us, but we kept on
for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy weather, since it was
safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel, rather than take the
inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a boatload of fish and
ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had our bearings, I had
often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we could do it again.
We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far enough, though we had
not counted the strokes; but we found nothing.

"Guess we have drifted too far to leeward; pull up to windward a little.
That's strange, we must have passed it, this blamed fog is so thick.
What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time and
then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel and
get our inner buoy. This seemed easy, but we found that it is as
important to have a point of departure as it is to have a destination,
and not knowing just where we were we could not head our boat to where
the vessel was. We shouted, and listened, rowed this way and that way
but not a sound came to us through the fog, although we knew that the
boy must be at his post ringing the bell, so that the boats could hark
their way back to the vessel. I learned afterward that the tide that
morning was exceptionally strong. I had noted its direction and made
allowance for it, before leaving the schooner, but we were where the
Gulf Stream and the Arctic Current are not very far apart and the
resulting tides are strong and changeable. We were in the grip of two