Sensory Deprivation

We made a thirty hour passage from the Charleston Harbor (near Coos Bay, Oregon) to Eureka California, with dense fog during the entire journey. It was an easy trip in other respects: relatively little wind, a quiet sea. But the overwhelmingly gray world played on our spirits, and left us feeling a little sad, a little bereft.

I have never tried to photograph the effect of fog when offshore, but the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto made a practice of photographing seascapes all over the world with a large format camera; his photograph "Ligurian Sea, Saviore" gives some sense of what that monotone world is like.

On the other hand, once we arrived in Eureka, the fog cleared, and we were delighted with the bright sun, vivid color, and delightful fraqrances of Northern California. We once again rented a car and hiked in the wildlife refuges around the fringes of Humboldt Bay. After that spell of sensory deprivation, we were nearly giddy as we hiked the marches and beaches!