Fog

There’s a lot of it about, tonight. Just been looking at the shipping forecast. Remembered all about fog in Shetland – a bit like the Newfoundland Banks, and high summer was the worst. You could be in your house by the cliff, thinking what a dismal day it was – dense fog, and couldn’t see past the garden wall. You’d go out for milk and find your house was the only one fogged in, along with your bit of cliff. The rest of Shetland was having a blue sky day with roaring sunshine. Or you could sit in the garden and watch long white fingers crawling over the cliff edge towards you, feeling the chill of it long before it touched.

The daffodils are waving in the breeze,

The little lambs are bouncing,

The fog comes rolling in –

It must be June.

Yes, things were always a bit late there. But the fog was always on time. Usually July.

Planes did not fly.  Post did not arrive. You'd be trying to explain to a solicitor or a bank down south that if the document wasn’t arriving, then the sky would just have to go ahead and fall in. No short cuts available. Post does not go by sea.  Helicopters and ambulance flights were a nightmare. Put a helicopter up in a gap and there was no guarantee you’d ever get it back before next week.

It might fly around looking for a landing, and end up in Glasgow. So you did your best not to put it up in the first place. Actually you weren’t allowed to let it take off if you couldn’t land it again, somewhere handy and accompanied by the usual fire protection, Air Traffic control etc etc.

Anyway, I was on watch one night in Shetland, when the fog was all the way from Shetland down the North Sea, the whole east coast solid with it. Very quiet night. Nothing moving. 

About one in the morning the silence was broken by a yacht calling an indistinctly named Coastguard station.  Nobody else answered, so I did. He asked for the weather forecast, and I directed him to the ‘conversation channel’. I asked him for his position.  Always a good idea especially if all of a sudden that’s the last you hear from somebody, on a dark and foggy night. Gives you a place to start when people get worried.  But I was simply intrigued because the funny thing was, he was lighting up all our aerials, from the very far north to south of the Shetland coast, making it look like he was everywhere at once, like God. And since he was only using VHF radio he would have a limit of about 30–50 miles, depending.

“Two miles off the Kentish Knot.”  Could have sworn that’s what he said.  I’d never heard of it but a stab at Kent wouldn’t be far off the mark, so I got him to stand by while I phoned Dover Coastguard. When they’d picked themselves up off the floor they tried calling the yacht. Hopeless. I heard them calling and I heard him not hearing them. They gave me the forecast over the phone and I passed it to the yacht. 

A few minutes later my phone rang.  It was the Coastguard at Tyne Tees.

“Did we just hear what we think we did?”

“You did indeed.”

It’s called atmospheric ‘Skip’, by the way.  Hop skip and a jump.

PS It turned out to be the Kentish Knock, a well-known area of shoaling waters east of the Thames estuary.