Fickle Fog

The weather was unusually warm and the skies uninterrupted blue as we set off under the Golden Gate Bridge on last Saturday’s whale watching trip. Even the sea between the bridge and Point Bonita known as the “Potato Patch” was calm (the Potato Patch is a shallow area prone to rough seas, supposedly named for the tossed and floating potatoes from overloaded boats delivering produce to Gold Rush era crowds.)

Maybe half-way on the 27 mile trip to the Farallon Islands things began to change, there were swells instead of total calm, and toward the west a canopy of low hanging clouds seemed out of place but undeniable. Jackets started to be pulled out of backpacks, zippers started to be zipped. Doggone it, summer fog had arrived ahead of schedule.

According to Weather Of The San Francisco Bay Region by Harold Gilliam, a terrific book unlocking the mysteries of the Bay Area's micro climates, the type of fog we witnessed was neither early nor unusual. “Wind from the northwest, skimming thousands of miles of ocean, absorbs great quantities of moisture that has evaporated from the surface.”

“The moisture is suspended in the air...(it) comes into contact with the cold, upwelled waters and is cooled off, causing vapor to condense into visible droplets. The result is the great fog bank that envelops most of the California coast intermittently during the late spring and summer.”

Lessons learned: 1. dress in layers for your whale watching trip, 2. tell your friends that you meant your photos to have this edgy, atmospheric effect, and 3. be prepared for the unexpected - think on your feet (sorry, that photo needed a caption).



Photos and text by Kathleen Jacques.