"Guess we have drifted too far to leeward; pull up to windward a little. That's strange, we must have passed it, this blamed fog is so thick. What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time and then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel and get our inner buoy. This seemed easy, but we found that it is as important to have a point of departure as it is to have a destination, and not knowing just where we were we could not head our boat to where the vessel was. We shouted, and listened, rowed this way and that way but not a sound came to us through the fog, although we knew that the boy must be at his post ringing the bell, so that the boats could hark their way back to the vessel. I learned afterward that the tide that morning was exceptionally strong. I had noted its direction and made allowance for it, before leaving the schooner, but we were where the Gulf Stream and the Arctic Current are not very far apart and the resulting tides are strong and changeable. We were in the grip of two great elemental and relentless forces, the impenetrable fog, cutting off all our communications, and the strong ocean current sweeping us away into the uninhabited waste of waters. From my experience of the year before, I knew what it meant to be lost in the fog on the Banks, practically in mid-ocean; I understood that if the fog lasted for a week or ten days as it sometimes did, especially at that season of the year, it was a fight for our lives. I soon realized that we were lost and that the fight was on. We were certainly stripped for it, without impedimenta, no anchor, compass, provisions, water, no means of catching fish or fowl, and with rather light clothing, as we were dressed for work and not for protection against cold. But youth is optimistic and claims what is coming to it, with a margin for luck, and we started on our new voyage of discovery with good courage and a cheerful disregard of the hardships, dangers and possible death in the fog, with which and into which we were drifting. It would not be strictly accurate to say that we saw nothing during all the time we were adrift, but the things we saw were of the same stuff that the fog was made of. Early in the first day I saw a sail dimly outlined in the misty air. I called John's attention to it with a shout, and he saw it too, but, as we rowed toward it, the sail retreated and then disappeared. We thought that this was strange, for the wind was not strong enough to take a vessel away from us faster than we could row, and we were near enough to make ourselves heard. Soon, the sail appeared again, and again we shouted and rowed toward it, and again it glided away from us and disappeared, and again, and again, through the seemingly endless procession of the slow-moving hours of that first day, we chased the phantom ship.