My second trip to the Banks was made in response to the same kind of impulse as that which drives the nomad out of his winter quarters in the springtime or brings the wild geese back to their summer feeding grounds. To one who really loves the ocean, the return to it after a period of exile on the land, is an indescribable satisfaction. There was at least one of our crew who experienced this emotion as our staunch little craft turned her nose to the blue water, and with all sail set and lee rail almost under water, leaped away from the petty restrictions of the shore into the practically limitless expanse of the Atlantic. In a week we were on the fishing ground and sentiment gave way to business. Our schooner was a trawler, equipped with six dories and a crew of fifteen, including the skipper, the cook, the boy and two men for each boat. Each trawl had a thousand hooks, a strong ground line six thousand feet long, with a smaller line two and a half feet in length, with hook attached, at every fathom. These hooks were baited and the trawl was set each night. The six trawls stretched away from the vessel like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, the buoy marking the outer anchor of each trawl being over a mile away. I was captain of a dory this year, passing as a seasoned fisherman with my experience of the year before. My helper or "bow-man" was John Hogan, a young Irishman about my own age, red-headed, but green at the fishing business. John's mother kept a little oasis for thirsty neighbors, in a city adjacent to my home town, and his father was a man of unsteady habits. But John was a good fellow, active and willing, and, though he had not inherited a rugged constitution, he could pull a good steady stroke. Soon after we reached the Banks, a storm swept our decks and nearly carried away our boats. As a result, the dories, particularly my own, were severely strained and leaked badly. For two weeks, however, we had no fog, but on the morning of the second of June, just as we went over the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the two weeks before and had sent their whole output in one consignment. We had just passed our inner buoy when the fog struck us, but we kept on for the outer buoy, as was customary in foggy weather, since it was safer to get that and pull in toward the vessel, rather than take the inner buoy, pull out, and find ourselves with a boatload of fish and ugly weather over a mile from the vessel. We had our bearings, I had often found the buoy in the fog and believed that we could do it again. We kept on rowing and knew when we had rowed far enough, though we had not counted the strokes; but we found nothing.