Sea Mist

We were on the Elizabeth, a rather comfortable yawl, on a mooring off Chatham. We had come that day from Dunkirk in a gentle southerly, and planned the following day to go up the Thames to St Katherine's dock - there to meet family and friends and for some crew, myself included, to quit the boat. We were tired only in the way that people who have spent a long day in the sun are tired, for the crossing had been little work except that which involves being rolled around while keeping a watch out for ships, and the night was warm and the wind, what there was of it, had died as the sun set – so we sat in the cockpit and sipped beer from bottles and had no desire to sleep anytime soon.

It was the owner who began, reciting some account he had heard of a headless Elizabethan said to wander the battlements of Upnor Castle. He was stood at the top of the companionway, silhouetted by the last of the dusk, and with the castle lit up beyond him and the lights reflected in the silent black river, and even though the tale was little more than a piece of trivia, the effect was impressive.

Joseph, a lawyer and the best old fellow I know, said that he also had a local story, and told us the yarn of a Dickensian miser who lived by Rochester churchyard and stole a bag of gold from a grave only to meet his comeuppance in the reanimated form of its occupier. It was a terrible old saw, but he had something of the barrister's ability to command his audience, and a stentorian roar to make us all jump at the end. 

It was understood, by then, that we would all have to tell something and I was racking my brains when Hans rescued me.

"I have a story of something that happened at sea if you would care to hear it."

Hans was sat right aft, cross legged with his back against the mizzen-mast. He was by some margin the most experienced sailor among us, having made ocean passages and once raced for his country in some hi-tech dinghy class. We all agreed we wanted to hear the story, expecting a strange occurrence in the South Pacific perhaps.

"Not something that happened to me, you understand," Hans continued , "but I believed the man who told it to me. I was nineteen, maybe twenty. My parents had been keen that I took a summer job in the UK to improve my English and, naturally, I found one sailing. Crewing and cleaning for a charter company in Southampton. But not every charter wants a crew and I worked, I reckon, no more than two weeks in three. The only thing I wanted to do when not sailing for money was sail for pleasure, and on one of my free weeks I hitched my way to Ipswich and joined a friend of a friend in a day race on the river. It went well, and I think with my help he improved his placing, and afterwards in the pub he paid for my drinks – my two weeks in three was not making me rich, and he introduced me to Bill.

"Bill was an older man. Age is a distant country when you are young, about which you know little and doubt you will ever visit. I guess Bill was in his sixties – which does not seem so very old to me now but back then he might as well have been ninety for all I knew of the difference. He was a short and active man, with a trimmed white beard and given to wearing a peaked captain's style hat which leant him an old man of the sea look. He was single-handing a small wooden yacht, needing to be back in the Deben the following week but with no particular plans before then, and he would be happy to take on a willing crew. He warned me it was not going to be exciting, for he preferred to make short day cruises between anchorages and had no ambitions of long crossings, great revelry in the evenings, or ever exceeding five knots. I told him that, even anchored, being afloat was preferable to being ashore - an opinion I still hold today.

"He slipped his mooring early the following day and expertly – he was showing off no doubt - brought his little boat up alongside the one upon which I was staying and had me toss my bag into the cockpit before jumping across myself. We had the sails up immediately. I remember the boat better than the man of course, she was similar to what you English call a Folkboat, but cutter rigged with a small bowsprit. Bill had me take her downriver while he cooked breakfast on a paraffin stove and she was a delight to sail, not fast but very responsive to the tiller and sheets.

"It was a day much like today has been, with a blue sky and a light wind, and we planned to go to the Blackwater but off Harwich, it must have been about there, the shipping forecast told us there was a risk of coastal fog. The affect on Bill was profound. For a moment I feared he intended to turn back up river but he said 'In that case I think we shall only go to the Walton backwaters. I am sorry young man.' He always called me young man, although I think Hans is an easy enough name for the English and he had had me spell it out for the log. 'I am sorry young man but I do not go to sea in any kind of fog.'

"I said this was fine, and may have uttered the saying about old sailors and bold sailors, and we anchored in a creek Bill knew in time for lunch. The backwaters, if you have not been, are a labyrinth of channels in amongst saltwater marshes, there are a few sandy beaches, and much of that silty east-coast mud which rises in strange architectural columns at low tide. It has some man-made dykes I believe, but you do not notice them from ground level and the place has the appearance of being entirely unchanged since it was one of the dark places of the earth and the Romans first rowed a trireme up the channel. A great flat stretch of wilderness. Nothing but marsh grass and sky for miles.

“Bill had plenty he was keen to do, for a man does not own a wooden boat unless he enjoys the maintaining of it, and he invented more exciting jobs for me -twice he had me up the mast and once over the side to satisfy some confected worry of his about the rudder - and this kept me amused. Although I admit I felt a pang of jealousy when a fleet of lasers went past. 

“It was a good spot, and we had no intention of moving, but Bill was still concerned about the fog. We saw it only as a haze around the sun or drifting by in little wisps and patches. Bill could not concentrate on any job below for the need to come up and check on it though, and we listened to every weather forecast on the radio. Every time it worsened even a tiny bit he would remark in a troubled tone that it did not seem to be burning off as expected. It was clear he did not like it one bit, although what he could have been afraid of, safely anchored away from the channel, I could not imagine. Then, in the late afternoon, just as the day was beginning to cool, we saw a seal floating by, its head poked up above the water and gazing at us curiously in that way they do.

“I do not think I would have noticed how anxious Bill had become had I not seen it fall away so fast. He visibly untensed, you could see it in his body, and a smile spread across his face. We were reseating the depth indicator at the time, Bill on deck and myself below, and he said – and he had never said this of any other job, that it was good enough for today and could be tidied up in the morning, and he suggested it was time for a drink.

“He produced a pair of gin and tonics and a bowl of pistachio nuts and we sat in the cockpit and discussed what we might have for dinner, and at some point he said 'Young man, I think you deserve an explanation as to why I will not sail in fog.'

“I said something about it being his boat and thus entirely a matter for his judgement, but he had obviously decided to tell me the story and he told it anyway.

“Three years before, he said, he had made a passage from Southwold to the Deben. It was early season and there were not many yachts out. The entrance to Southwold is a tricky one, one of those where the sandbars move in the winter storms and new instructions are issued in the spring, and it should only be attempted in the second half of a rising tide and often there is a small crowd of boats coming in and out, but not that day. Bill went though alone. At sea the flood was set against him and he made such slow progress that an hour later he could still see Southwold pier behind him, but the wind was favourable, and once the current slackened he expected to make good speed. Ahead of him the looming bulk of Sizewell power station made navigation simple, and the solitude of that empty stretch of coast – mostly a wildlife reserve – leant the day a serene, magical quality.

“The fog arrived unforecast, suddenly, and in a visible grey wall which rolled in from the sea. Fog is always a concern but Bill was not unduly worried, his course south was simple and free of dangers and there was every chance the weather would clear before he had to attempt the entrance at the Deben, and if not he knew it well, or could even carry on to Harwich and one of the easier harbours there. He had time, he said, to take some compass bearings and note the reading on the log before bringing up the foghorn from below and setting in to a watchful journey. His only real concern was the lee shore and he adjusted his course a little to the east to give himself some extra room.

“It was as thick a fog as he had ever known, and the land and sky were swiftly consumed to leave nothing but a few metres of grey-green water in sight beyond the boat. He sounded his horn and made a mental note of the time for when to sound it next. As soon as the sound died away, he said, he heard distant church bells. Very faint but unmistakable. He guessed they were coming from Walberswick behind him. Sound can travel a long way in the fog sometimes.”

“That is true,” said the owner. “I once heard the Manacles bell from five miles in a fog.”

I noticed Joseph ever so subtly shush him.

“Bill went on,” Hans continued. “Marking time by the sounding of his foghorn, making frequent dead reckonings, and by his own admission unable to settle, going often to stand at the shrouds, the better to peer ahead. He saw nothing, but the church bells became steadily louder. After a while it became apparent that he was hearing more than one church.

“He checked his course, and he double checked it with his hand-bearing compass, and he scoured the chart for what churches he might be hearing. The only town between him and Sizewell was Dunwich which he had never been to but he knew to be little more than a hamlet. 'A ruined abbey and a teashop,' was how he put it. It may have had a church, but it certainly had no more than one. He wondered if he were in fact hearing the sound of Belgian or Dutch churches carried in on the wind.

“Then he started to hear more. Not just the sound of church bells but the sound of voices. It was still faint, and it was a babble, many voices all talking at once so he could not make any of them out. It was, he said, like the sound of a crowded room heard through a closed door, so everything was indistinct and both distant and close at the same time.

“None of this worried him except for the obvious concern that he might be close to the shore, but his reckoned position, and the empty nature of the shoreline, all told him that could not be the case. He was gripped by a sense of wonder and confusion, but not alarm. And then he made out another sound. It was the sound of cart wheels and the whinnying of horses. That, he told me, was when he began to suspect that the sounds were not some atmospheric phenomenon, but otherworldly.

“He detached the tiller from the wind vain and steered the boat by hand then, straining his eyes to peer into the fog. You will all have been caught in fog I suspect, so you will know that sometimes we fancy we see shapes in it. The prow of a container ship bearing down on me is what I always think I see – or think I am about to see. Bill knew this experience too and said what he saw was something else entirely.

"He found himself sailing past buildings, port and starboard as if he were on a canal. They were not the shadows we fancy we see, but real buildings, with gabled roofs and porches and windows. Bill said he made out occasional movements behind net curtains, or doors closing as he drew near. Yet, even while these details convinced him they were no tricks of his eyes, they always seemed to lurk just further away than where they would become clear. They were an impossibility, and he dared not turn for fear, not of hitting them, but of seeing them fully.

"As he went on they rose in height till their chimneys were up beyond the top of the mast. The hubbub of voices grew louder too, and the different church bells had become distinct from one another. They came and went all around him he said, as if from many different churches near and distant. Always though there was one dead ahead that kept a steady peal and to which he was drawing nearer.

“Then there was a splash and a bark. A seal was swimming right beside the cockpit and gazing up at him. Then another, then several more. They were at first all around the boat but mostly left and right of the cockpit, moving frantically and barking. Then they would dive and reappear off to starboard and bark again, and somehow where they were, the buildings would not be, and when they dived, the buildings would reappear. They did this over and again. Popping up right beside him, almost touching the hull, then off to starboard and barking loudly.

“He said he understood what they wanted with seconds to spare. He saw the buildings part to reveal a square full of shadowy people, a throng of them stretching back into the murk as far as he could make out, a great steeple rising up behind them. And the moment he saw them the noise of their voices ceased and they seemed to all turn toward him.

"He put the tiller over and gybed the boat with a crash toward the seals. I will repeat what he told me. 'As she turned her bowsprit crossed almost in reach of the closest. He stretched out for it and his hand was nothing but bones, and at the last moment his face came out of the shadow and there were no eyes in his sockets or lips about his teeth. I do not know what would have happened if I had passed within his reach, but I doubt very much I would be here today.'”

Hans paused and looked at all three of us in turn, as if daring us to dismiss this as poppycock.

“I believed Bill when he told me that,” Hans said. “And I believe it still. He followed the seals only for a few minutes until the fog lifted as suddenly as it had descended, and there was the sun clear in the sky, and there was the land, now directly ahead him, and there was the horizon distinct behind him. He turned back south, and took a bearing from Sizewell and found he was exactly where he had supposed himself to be, about a mile off Minsmere wildlife reserve, just beyond Dunwich. Do you know about Dunwich?”

The owner and Joseph both nodded but I told him I did not.

“It was once a great port town,” Joseph told me. “One of the largest in east Anglia, but it sunk into the sea in a storm hundreds of years ago.”