At three in the morning we put to sea, bound for _Jan Mayen_. As we left the mouth of the fiord a dense fog, a fog so thick that our mast head light shone no brighter than a glowworm and the forms of the forward watch were not distinguishable from the bridge. The captain miscalculated his position, thinking he was well outside of the rookeries, and turned the yacht northward into the tide rips and cross-channels that characterize this, the most dangerous portion of the entire Icelandic coast. Whalebacks and skerries abound in these waters and there are no lighthouses, no bell buoys, no fog horns to warn the master. He must rely entirely upon himself and take long chances. In crossing the tide current between two of the small islands the _Matador_, now wallowed deeply in the trough of the wave and now rode airily upon its angry crest of curling and running water. It was here that the _Matador_ and her little group of scientists nearly ended their ocean voyages. The lookout was doubled. We steamed with great caution, for the fog was thick. Suddenly the breakers boomed all around us. We jumped to the crest of an angry wave, growling and curling backwards with white breakers. Sideways the yacht slid downward into the yeasty trough. The ragged ridge, like an apparition clothed in steel-gray garments of shifting mists, suddenly loomed dead ahead and under the prow. “Stop,” rang the signal in the engine room. “Hard-a-port,” was the sharp order to the helmsman. Sideways we sheered from those yawning and serrated jaws, which have crunched many a Viking sea-horse in former days and many a fishing smack in the modern. Would the trough of the sea well up in season for our keel to clear that ridge? Our lives hung upon the favorable and instantaneous answer to that question which was in the mind of each observer of that horrid sight. With a roar as of impending doom the waters returned and smashed against our beam so fiercely that everything on board was moved which was not actually nailed down. The sleepers were tossed from their bunks, there was a clash and clatter of pots in the galley and a sizzle of hot steam from the upset kettles. The faces of the few who viewed those yawning, greedy jaws took on an ashy hue, the grayness and pallor of the fog itself. We recovered our breath in a long sigh of relief as the _Matador_ with “full-speed-ahead” slipped through the foaming waters into the steady roll of the deeper sea. That was an experience which those who participated in it never wish to repeat.