Motoring along in fog

Saxon Blue's Blog
Harvey Jones and Andrea Stokes
Sun 22 Aug 2010 15:54
65:44.242N 61:48.877W Sunday noon

We've been motoring through fog all night with Magnus on watch and now we're still motoring through fog with Andrea and I keeping an eye on the radar. We're making good progress but there's nothing to see. We passed another ship half and hour ago but he was 2.5 miles away so we just saw him on the radar and the AIS.

Our watch last night between 2000 and 2400 was beautiful. The sun was below the horizon in the North and the sky was lit up red. Ahead of us, Jupiter was up and I could see two of its moons through the binoculars. Over to starboard was a full, red moon with light clouds in front of it. It never got very high but just hung over the mountains of Baffin Island, silhouetting them against the sky. Apart from us and celestial objects, we didn't see very much atall.

There were some lights on one of the mountaintops which must have been the US DEW-line base at Cape Dyer. They built all these Distant Early Warning sites in the 1950s to keep a watch on Soviet incursions via the Arctic. I think most of them are closed now but there were certainly people at this one. The base near Clyde had been closed for years and there is now a clean-up operation taking place. They're digging out all the dirt that's contaminated with diesel etc, shipping it south in containers and then bringing it back once it's been cleaned. Apparently it's keeping 40 people employed so I suppose that's a good thing.

Harvey

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