A Foggy Evening on the Mary

The evening of October 15, 2011 was a foggy one in Long Beach. I was walking back to my car when I happened to turn around and notice just how thick it was. You couldn't even see the downtown area across the bay!

I quickly grabbed my camera and went back aboard to take the following shots:

It felt as if the Queen was on the old North Atlantic run again. The fog seemed to have magically transported her from Long Beach to her natural element (at least when looking off to starboard). I could just stand there and imagine what it must have been like back she was sailing; all it lacked was the rolling.

Snapshot: A Foggy Morning in Long Beach

This photo was taken last week and gives a truly spectacular view of the Queen Mary and Carnival Paradise on one particularly foggy morning. Mornings like this are common in Long Beach this time of year, which is perfect since Halloween is coming up soon!

A Lesson Not to be Forgotten

While returning from India aboard the RMS Georgic in 1947, Captain Harry Grattidge encountered a heavy fog and encountered what he considered to be a serious case of negligence on the part of another ship. He decided, therefore, to give them a lesson that they would not soon forget. But Captain Grattidge himself would also learn something.

Yes, she was a good ship, the Georgic, sturdy and reliable, with a whistle that cut the air like a razor if you needed it. It was...making for Liverpool, that I ran into fog off Anglesey, but not until the small hours of the morning did the officer of the watch send word that a vessel grouped around by smaller vessels had been plotted close ahead on the radar screen. So I ran topside to the bridge, reducing speed and altering course, blowing our whistle but getting no reply. Suddenly, at 2:30 A.M., the craft I had sought loomed out of the fog, close to our bow, silent as a ghost ship but with all her deck lights burning. By heaven, I thought, I'll teach them not to use their whistle when there's fog around, and for two unbroken minutes I made the night hideous with the ear-splitting scream of the Georgic's whistle.

Next morning, in Liverpool, Cunard's shore staff came aboard to ask searching questions. Had I run into anything unusual during the night? I gave the facts, but ended triumphantly: "If they threw a scare on me, I certainly threw a worse one on them. I blew the whistle so loudly that everyone asleep on that ship must have jumped clean from their bunks.

They seemed to know all about that. "The ship," explained one of them kindly, "was H.M.S. Dido.They were relying on radar, not blowing their whistle, so as to give their passengers a good night's rest."

Passengers on a destroyer? I said I could scarcely credit it. But no one had warned me, after all, that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were crossing on an official visit to the Isle of Man.

Captain Grattidge would then write that his entire life had been full of mistakes like this one. But there is certainly no doubt that both parties learned a lesson from the entire experience.


References: Captain Harry Grattidge, Captain of the Queens: The Autobiography of Captain Harry Grattidge, Former Commodore of the Cunard Line as told to Richard Collier (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1956), 12-13.

"We're going in."

Docking a ship - any ship - requires tremendous skill, ability and resolve. Even more so when the weather is bleakly uncooperative. But master seamanship is what wins the day, as Captain Bob Arnott (later of the Queen Elizabeth 2) witnessed firsthand aboard the RMS Carinthia in 1960, under the command of the future Commodore Geoffrey Marr:

[He] was a great talker, words tumbling from his lips at an amazing rate, and his gift for rhetoric was superbly demonstrated in his lecture presentation on the sinking of the Bismarck. Geoffrey had served in the Royal Navy Reserve on one of the ships that sent the German battleship to the bottom on 27 May 1941, so his graphic descriptions were wholly authentic.

Yet I remember him not so much for his oratory as for a remarkable piece of navigation that brought Carinthia safely to the Pier Head in Liverpool when the Mersey was cloaked completely in blinding black fog. We were anchored in the river waiting for the solid blanket to lift; even the ferry boats across the Mersey were unable to move. Suddenly Geoffrey's fine voice called: 'We're going in.' He talked our tugs to us over the VHF radio and, with visibility down to zero, took the huge 22,000-ton liner cleanly into the landing stage. Passengers, already resigned to another night at sea, cheered in relief and delight, and the crew, anxious to get home to loved ones, were equally elated. It was a magnificent achievement by the Captain, considering the quite elementary navigational aids of 1960 in comparison to today's sophistication.

Captain Arnott then explains how he believes Captain Marr accomplished this feat:

It's a matter of record that some Captains have a sixth sense in fog; they can 'see' things quite invisible to the eyes of ordinary humans, and have often made apparently inexplicable decisions which, within seconds, have saved ships and lives.

Perhaps it is either ouf of modesty that many captains do not wish to talk about it. Perhaps it is due to the fact they themselves cannot explain.

In any case, Captains generally won't discuss the matter, and that includes the normally prolific talker, Commodore Geoffrey Marr.

References: Captain Robert Harry Arnott, Captain of the Queen: The autobiography of the most famous sea captain of them all. (London: Quadrant Books, 1982), 125-126.