Fog took the north bank at first honk on Sunday. Preening visibility: about half a wing, the Warden of the Sluice said, with uncharacteristic precision. The advisory, issued through the usual channels, asked all waterfowl to postpone non-essential floating, and asked those who floated anyway to go in a straight line, slower than they thought they needed to.
The Warden’s full statement, obtained with the Warden’s reluctant permission, ran four sentences:
“The pond is currently obscured. We do not know by how much, because the instrument that would tell us is itself obscured. The advisory is this. Stay where you are; if you must move, move slowly; if you cannot move slowly, reconsider moving. The reeds will be thereabouts when the fog lifts.”
That is the Warden’s register: four sentences, no instrument. The numbers are the deputy’s department. The numbers came from the Warden’s deputy, then, before the deputy too became hard to locate. Humidity stood at nine drakes shortly after dawn. By mid-morning it was eleven. At which point the gauge and the deputy reading it both drifted out of sight and have not been heard from since. The deputy is not, at this stage, considered missing. Merely difficult.
Honking carried through the morning, and meant less than it sounds. Honking in fog travels further than in fair weather and signifies, on average, rather less. One drake, hunting his immediate family, circled a sunken log three times and concluded, by means unclear even to him, that he was no nearer anywhere than an hour before. He was last seen paddling toward what he took to be the bank.
A cluster of goslings reported they could see, in order, each other, a reed, and nothing past it. One offered the view that the world had ended in the night and only their party had been spared. The correspondent elected not to contest the point. A second gosling, consulted separately, agreed. The rest had preened and were unavailable.
The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, reached by honk, compared the fog unfavourably with the celebrated fog of three autumns ago, in which the entire east channel went missing for the better part of a week and had to be found by elimination. No comparable loss of channel has been reported. Though the Clerk conceded that, in these conditions, the channel could be gone for hours before anyone noticed. A search party of one volunteer was dispatched. It has since been lost.
Advice to anyone planning a Sunday paddle: don’t. Advice to anyone already out: come back, by whatever route presents itself. The Subcommittee intends to audit positions once visibility returns, so any duck who has used the cover to quietly move house is asked, with admirable optimism, to move back.
The forecast calls for the fog to lift in the afternoon (ish). A revised bulletin will follow when anything can be seen. Whether that is before the deputy turns up, or after, is not a question the gazette is yet able to answer.