about eight o'clock
Strictly , I believe , we should have kept the sea all night ; but I had not the grit to suggest that course , and Davies was only too glad of an excuse for threading the shoals of the Accumer Ee on a rising tide . The atmosphere had been slowly clearing as the day wore on ; but we had scarcely anchored ten minutes before a blanket of white fog , rolling in from seaward , swallowed us up . Davies was already afield in the dinghy , and I had to guide him back with a foghorn , whose music roused hosts of sea birds from the surrounding flats , and brought them wheeling and complaining round us , a weird invisible chorus to my mournful solo . The fog hung heavy still at daybreak on the 20th , but dispersed partially under a catspaw from the south about eight o'clock , in time for us to traverse the boomed channel behind Baltrum , before the tide left the watershed . ` We sha n't get far to-day , ' said Davies , with philosophy . ` And this sort of thing may go on for any time . It 's a regular autumn anti-cyclone -- glass thirty point five and steady .