My grandfather Charles Hopkinson, whose dazzling landscapes and portraits are on display throughout the summer at Cape Ann Museum, spent most of his 92 years in Manchester.

He had a lifelong love affair with the sea and ships of all sizes. In school and college, he filled his books and papers with doodles and detailed sketches of skiffs, sloops, schooners, ketches, yawls, catboats, brigs, barques, and clipper ships. Long after school — indeed, throughout his life — he would draw little sketches in the margins of books on ships and the sea to explain how a particular part of a ship's rigging worked, or to correct an error in the text or an illustration.

He sailed whenever he had a chance. But messing about in small boats was what he loved best, and he took great pleasure in passing along this joy to daughters and grandchildren alike.

One July day in 1945, when I was 11, he decided I was ready to handle his 15-foot centerboard sloop, the Armada, alone (almost alone; he'd be a passenger while I rowed us out in the dinghy, made sail, and handled tiller and sheets on a short sail around Egg Rock and back). The day was bright and clear, with a gentle breeze ruffling the water, and not a cloud in the sky.

He put a couple of sandwiches in a paper bag, squashed an old straw hat on his head, and took the oars out of the hall closet. The oarlocks clanged together, bringing John Joiner, his little Welsh terrier, bounding out of his wingback chair to join us. He was not about to miss a sail.

Under my grandfather's watchful eye, I rowed us out, carefully feathering the oars at every stroke. We were soon aboard the sloop. I tied the dinghy's painter to the eye splice on the mooring pennant with two half-hitches, unlaced the sail cover and stowed it away under the foredeck, hung the rudder on the transom, lowered the centerboard, hoisted the mainsail and jib, and cast off, leaving the dinghy rocking on the mooring.

We were soon out beyond Egg Rock. My grandfather hadn't said a word about my steering or sail handling. I was aglow with happiness. Then, almost without warning, we were in thick fog.

The wind died away at the same moment, and we were left to rise and fall on the oily swell coming in from the east. The sea was gray satin, with only an occasional ripple to show there was still a ghost of a breeze.

We sat and waited. After a while he took a stub of a pencil out of his pocket and sharpened it with the jackknife he produced from another pocket. The shavings curled over the side. He produced an envelope from somewhere else, flattened it out, and began to sketch: a Gloucester fishing schooner heading home from the Banks with a trip o' fish, thrashing along under shortened sail into a sou'wester. In a few strokes, he had captured the driving wind, the long dark seas, the pounding of the hull into the waves, the decks awash with water pouring through the scuppers, the struggle of the helmsman to keep a sharp lookout and hold the vessel on course.

"Time for a bite to eat?" he asked me. I started to fish the sandwiches out of the bag, then stopped. I had heard a voice, off to port.

Then another, louder, more distinct; then a muffled laugh.

Then the creak of a block as a line worked back and forth over its sheave. The groan of oak timbers moving against one another. Something huge was out there in the fog, just beyond our narrow circle of vision.

Then the fog scaled up, and ... O, Glory! A huge square-rigged ship loomed up above us, all sails set and drawing in the gentle breeze, easing along to the westward.

We stared dumbfounded at the sight. Could it be real? Was it a mirage? A trick of the fog? A warp in time? What square-¬­rigger could be still be sailing in 1945? My grandfather would know, I was sure — but a look at his face, as open-mouthed as mine, told me that he was as astonished as I, and not quite sure whether we were looking at reality or a ghostly apparition.

Three or four men stood along the vessel's starboard rail high above us; one, smoking a pipe, leaned over the side to wave, looking real enough. The water bubbled along the square-rigger's broad oak flanks and rippled outward to lap against our hull, rocking us back and forth; that, too, was real. John Joiner, loafing in the bilges, didn't seem overly impressed.

As quickly as the ship had appeared, she passed us by to disappear into the mist once more. But we both saw her name as she ghosted by: Joseph Conrad was picked out on her broad black transom in bright white letters.

The Joseph Conrad now lies at Mystic Seaport, where's she's been moored to a dock for most of the 64 years since her ghostly appearance off Cape Ann.

Tom Halsted is a regular Times columnist.