(see the full-size close-up below)

When my friend Kurt Russell first saw this scene he was ghosting along a featureless Carolina coast fog bank in his 23-foot Com-Pac sailboat, Epiphany. Suddenly he saw the fog thin high above him and there appeared the upper masts and rigging of a large white motor-sailer whispering along at the edge of visibility. He saw the ship’s upper rigging but not the hull. Then suddenly the fog swirled aside like a parting gossamer curtain and there she was in all her glory. I pictured this mysterious white fog-runner as an apparition in the first half-light before dawn, running lights a-glow as she slowly emerged from her sheltering bank of gray mist, sleek and silent as a huge Great White shark sliding out from the dim gray reaches of the watery Atlantic. This is my watercolor of her emerging.

This is a close-up image from the full-size print, showing the detail involved