Some time after daylight I became aware of the intermittent three blasts of the fog whistle. When the junior woke me at the end of his watch he said we had been going through fog for about an hour, and that it seemed to be getting thicker each minute. He remarked that the captain was looking for a message from some one. The first mate came into the mess room as I was downing a stack of flapjacks, and seemed rather the worse for wear. The Old Man had had him up all night, he said, either looking for fog or trying to get out of it. We were due at the entrance to the channel at about eleven o’clock. This meant several hours of running through the fog. The skipper might have anchored and waited until it lifted, but he naturally enough chose to go ahead, hoping that as he neared the end of the five-hour run the fog would have thinned enough to enable him to find the breakwater and thence the entrance to the river. Above all things, he would want to be on time on this, his first trip as captain of a passenger ship. If we ran into anything in the fog--well, we’d better not. There was little chance of our meeting anything except a tug or some other small boat. Ore carriers went outside. No other passenger vessel of any size was scheduled to be coming out of the Portage Lake Canal, and the small twin towns which straddled it would be as somnolent under the sticky, warm fog as two cats in the sun. At eight o’clock the wheelhouse phone rang, and the skipper wanted to know what the weather was in the canal. Of course. I could not tell him, for there was no radio station there, but I told him I would try to find out. Starting up the old transmitter, I jerked out a few calls for any one in the vicinity of the mouth of the canal, but no one answered. It was as I thought, no ship large enough to carry wireless was anywhere near the point toward which we were heading. The _Jenkins_, out in the lake, reported no fog, and after a call or two, Duluth answered sleepily and said no fog. So we were in for it. It might last an hour and it might last the rest of the day. As I was about to phone up this information the mate blustered in. “Well, bud, what’s the news?” he roared at me. He was that way, roaring at every one and everything. I suspected that he was some way miffed because a new man had come aboard over his head and kept him from taking the _Chippewa_ down on his own ticket. “No news is good news,” I answered glibly enough. The fog didn’t bother me. I was in no hurry. Houghton was a warm place in July, and since we usually stayed there long enough for the passengers to go down a copper mine but not long enough for the officers to have a spree on shore, I saw no reason why an hour’s delay would prove anything but a gift. “Never mind the bright remarks, bud. The Old Man wants a report on this damn fog. What have you got?” “Not a thing. The _Jenkins_ off Keeweenaw is in fair weather, and Duluth reports sun and moderate breezes from the northwest.”