I had not the grit to suggest that course, and Davies was only too
glad of an excuse for threading the shoals of the Accumer Ee on a
rising tide. The atmosphere had been slowly clearing as the day wore
on; but we had scarcely anchored ten minutes before a blanket of
white fog, rolling in from seaward, swallowed us up. Davies was
already afield in the dinghy, and I had to guide him back with a
foghorn, whose music roused hosts of sea birds from the surrounding
flats, and brought them wheeling and complaining round us, a weird
invisible chorus to my mournful solo.

The fog hung heavy still at daybreak on the 20th, but dispersed
partially under a catspaw from the south about eight o'clock, in time
for us to traverse the boomed channel behind Baltrum, before the tide
left the watershed.

'We shan't get far to-day,' said Davies, with philosophy. 'And this
sort of thing may go on for any time. It's a regular autumn
anti-cyclone--glass thirty point five and steady. That gale was the
last of a stormy equinox.'

We took the inside route as a matter of course to-day. It was now the
shortest to Norderney harbour, and scarcely less intricate than the
Wichter Ee, which appeared to be almost totally blocked by banks, and
is, in fact, the most impassable of all these outlets to the North
Sea. But, as I say, this sort of navigation, always puzzling to me,
was utterly bewildering in hazy weather. Any attempt at orientation
made me giddy. So I slaved at the lead, varying my labour with a
fierce bout of kedge-work when we grounded somewhere. I had two rests
before two o'clock, one of an hour, when we ran into a patch of
windless fog; another of a few moments, when Davies said, 'There's