A lovely evening cruise goes wrong when fog rolls in and the radar fails.
Illustration, Steve Haefele
There’s a lovely farm-to-table restaurant on North Haven Island inMaine’s Penobscot Bay, and one summer we arranged to meet friends who were overnighting on their way home from a Camden Yacht Club cruise. My wife, Sue, and I have a powerboat, so the plan was to rendezvous at their anchorage, pick them up, and motor over to the restaurant for
dinner. Afterward, we’d deliver them back to their boat, then carry on home to Camden.
It was a memorable evening of wonderful food and good company. By the time we disembarked our friends and set off for home, it was 9:30 p.m. and good old Maine fog was thickening around us. But not to worry – our new boat, a 30-foot Nimbus W9 powercruiser, was well set up with radar and chartplotter, and we knew the area. We proceeded down the Fox Islands Thoroughfare past the village of North Haven and headed northwest across the bay to Camden in a flat calm.
Everything went smoothly until we entered Camden Harbor and its narrow, twisty channel between mooring fields. I throttled way back and as a precaution decided to power up the bow thruster while we crawled through the harbor. I wanted extra maneuverability just in case. The fog was now so thick I could hardly make out our own bow.
But the moment I switched on the thruster, the radar went dead. What?! I need that! I went into neutral, powered down the thruster and restarted the radar, then re-engaged the engine. Again, I hit the thruster switch, and again the radar blinked out. Once more and … this time the radar went away for good. I was blind. Our searchlight lit up the fog well, but I could see no lights on shore and by now was disoriented.
At less than a walking pace, we felt our way along, fending off moored boats that emerged from the fog. After what felt like an hour of this, I had to stop and try to work out where we were. We still had water under us, but the tide was dropping. I went to the rail to get away from the instrument lights and try to think. As I stood there, the fog thinned slightly, and I realized that we were bobbing just a few feet off the yacht club dock. We made it!
The next day – beautifully clear, of course – a technician went out with me, and we tried to replicate the radar failure. We couldn’t do it. The yard traced and tested all the wiring, yet everything seemed fine. Three seasons and any number of foggy days later, it has never happened again. But I did go out and set an autopilot track from the mouth of the harbor along the middle of the channel all the way to the yacht club dock – just in case.