Day 48, August 4 -- Rogue's Roost to Port Mouton -- 59 NM

This was a less that ideal passage day, due to my own confusion and the action of Mother Nature. I had calculated the distance of 59 NM but when I thought about in in the morning, 29 miles came to my mind instead. So with it being a bit hazy outside, we lallygagged about and did not get underway until 11:30. I should have taken a picture of the narrow channel with the rocks in the middle, but we were too busy getting ILENE safely past them. We started with motor and when a bit of wind came up I put up the genoa, rather than the main. So while we sailed a while it was mostly motor sailing -- and then the fog rolled in. Had we started earlier,  we would have had time to go slower. But an earlier start would have meant more hours of motoring before the wind came up.
There is this song: "On a clear day, you can see forever...." This may be true if you look skyward into the in finite reaches of the universe, but due to the curvature of the earth's surface, when looking out from ILENE, on which my eye is about ten feet above sea level,my personal horizon is only 3.6 NM away. This, according to Eldridge, who knows a lot about things nautical. A twenty foot high island or boat  would be visible to me 8.7 miles away.
At first the fog was not bad with estimated visibility of more than five miles. But it got worse. We passed an island at 2.75 miles, according to the cursor's measure on the chart plotter, and could not see it. Eventually it got to the very dangerous 100 yards of visibility stage and we doused sail to improve visibility and slow ourselves down, blew our fog horn. turned on the radar and were as eagle eyed as possible.
With 100 yards of visibility, at six knots, I have three seconds from first sighting an object to collision, less if the other object is coming toward me. A large buoy loomed up out of the mist to starboard as expected. Later, with slightly better visibility, a small fishing boat appeared to port unexpectedly. Later, we heard the loud moan of the fog horn mounted on Liverpool's Western Head, which got louder and louder as we passed 1/4 mile south of it. It stayed foggy until we closed the beach at which we were to anchor. Then the fog lifted, while we were anchoring, only to roll back in five minutes later.

On our first try, the anchor did not hold, I could hear it scraping over a rocky bed.  as we pulled backwards slowly in reverse to set it. We retrieved the anchor and moved 300 yards along the beach to the same spot that Lene's iNavix said we had anchored the other time we were here, about a month ago.. It held there, snugly, in 20 feet of water. There were folks strolling along the beach and we heard the gentle surf on it, but we did not lower the dink and explore the beach, we were too tired after fighting the fog.
During the day we passed Lunenberg. We have been into, out of and past that harbor on three days and two of the three of them have been foggy. Hmmm...
It was eight p.m. Easy and delicious franks and beans and kraut and bread and mustard for dinner and off to duty in "blanket bay" for the night.