On the Sunday afternoon of Columbus Day weekend in 2003, Mary Jagoda, 19, and Sarah Aronoff, 20, kayaked into a thick October fog from Ayer’s Beach in Harwich Port, Massachusetts. Before going out into Nantucket Sound, they told their boyfriends that they were going to paddle around for 10 minutes. When they hadn’t returned 40 minutes later, their boyfriends called for assistance. Two days later, the Coast Guard found Mary’s body floating in Pollack Rip, several miles off Monomoy Island. Sarah’s body was never recovered.

I was kayaking in the sound within a few hundred yards of them at the precise time they left the beach, but I couldn’t see farther than a hundred feet in those conditions. That wasn’t unusual. Anyone who has kayaked in New England for any length of time will have stories about fog. It’s unavoidable, and the farther north you go, the more fog you’ll encounter.

There must be a measure of luck in being handed the good fortune to come home wiser where others have perished. In part, this is the story of my passage from a foolish neophyte to a kayaker who is at least knowledgeable of the risks. I have to confess to having “backed into” sea kayaking, and in retrospect, I took many risks that I shouldn’t have taken while using my first kayak to go fly-fishing. I often ended up with dinner on my stringer, but I found that more and more, I just enjoyed the paddling.