In case you weren't down at the lake today, we had some serious fog roll in. I was lucky/unlucky enough to be out in it...a really memorable sail. Spent two hours trying to find the gap at the south end at Southshore...even with GPS the visibility was so unbelieveably poor that you couldn't sure you'd found the gap until you sitting right in the middle of it. But the conditions for being stuck in fog were about as good as you could hope for..light steady winds and flat seas. You could just about hear a pin drop out there.

Me too! we spent a few hours just sitting out there in the fog drifting with so little wind I didn't even have to take the sails down. I would have never made it throught that gap without my gps! You wouldn't happen to be the boat that we came accross outside that gap about 9pm are you? If so we couldn't see you till we were right next to eachother, but we could hear you talking a while before that.

nope...it wasn't me. i got in a little befor six pm. i dropped my head sail so i could see better though i'm not sure it made much difference.

This happened to me last year..without warning.

You could see the solid band of fog coming towards the shore and I was trying to outrun it. I got through the north gap because you could sort of see it, but then inside the breakwater it became totally opaque in all directions.

That's a weird feeling. And as you hear blind people say, you start to focus on other senses; like sound and smell.

I could hear people sitting and talking in that little sea-wall park north of the sailing center. I could hear the water against the rocks below them.

I could hear people on other boats around me. I could hear people and their boats at the launch ramps.

I had no sense of how much and in what direction I might be moving.
I didnt have my GPS plotter with me so I just sort of went by my gut.

I guess I got lucky.

Old Story re. Milwaukee fog:

My dad use to tell the story of the day he was out sailing in his O'Day Daysailer and the fog set in. He always had a compass on board (how he use to swing a compass is another story) even though it was a small center board daysailer. He was using his compass to tack back up the outer harbor to the inside gap when a "stinkpotter", as he use to say, hailed him and asked how to get back to McKinley Marina. My dad said to follow him, but he explained how he had to tack up wind.

By the time they got into the mooring area the fog lifted and there was a trail of motor boats zigzagging behind him into the harbor. Of course each time the story was told the number got greater, I'll just leave you with the image of the zigzag line.

foggy again yesterday....there's another sailboat in the center of this foto

We installed radar on Tursiops based on similar fog encounters.

Keeping track of boats in the area and finding the gaps in the breakwall is a piece of cake with it on. Ours does the radar overlay of the chart display so situational awareness is simple.

With that said, I doubt I'd spend the money if I had to do it again. In retrospect and in all honesty, we just haven't used it enough. Even in a case like in the picture, good awareness and skills can keep you reasonably safe. I could have spent the couple thousand dollars on a new sail instead, used it all the time, and be much happier about the hit to the pocket book.