Besides the usual question Don’t You Get Bored?, the next question “What do you do on a lighthouse?” also needs to be answered.
What do you do in your house? TV, video games, go to a show, eat out?
We did not have those luxuries, so we worked with our hands as they did in the early days.
Some people liked knitting, crocheting, or sewing; drawing, painting, or designing; writing; photography; and . . . woodwork! Now there was one I liked. Continue reading What Do You Do On a Lighthouse?
by Jeannie (Hartt) Nielsen (daughter of Ed Hartt, Senior Keeper on Langara 1957 – 1963)
My dad built me a 8 foot plywood rowboat on Langara. It was my pride and joy. I often rowed it in the “cut”. This was a sheltered cove where the supply workboat brought our groceries and fuel, and hooked slings onto the skyhook to bring the goods onshore.
Often the cut would become choked with kelp, fouling the workboats prop. I would take a machete, throw my boat in, and spend the warm summer days leaning over the side of the boat and chopping the heads off the kelp. They would then sink to the bottom, leaving the area clean. Continue reading My Rowboat On Langara Island
Last night I saw a documentary on the German TV channel NDR about searching for Sunfish (Mola mola) – Mondfische in the German language which means Moonfish – off the California Coast and off the Italian island of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea.
Now, this is a website about lighthouses – why would I be writing about Sunfish?
Well one year warm California currents moved north – as far north as Prince Rupert, BC. I am not too sure of the exact year but judging from the years with warmest sea surface temperatures 1 I would guess it to be about 1984 as I remember an assistant 2 named Roger Mogg on station at the time. Continue reading I Saw a Sunfish
You know those email jokes that go around saying things like:
“How Old is Grandpa?“
And Grandpa replies, “I was born before television, penicillin, polio shots,
frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, Frisbees, and the pill. There were no credit cards, laser beams, or ball-point pens.
Man had not invented pantyhose, air conditioners, dishwashers, or clothes dryers, and man hadn’t yet walked on the moon, etc. . . .”
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Now let’s switch to an isolated lighthouse in the 1970s, 1980s, etc. . . . and a different question:
Don’t you get bored? Continue reading Don’t You Get Bored?
Anyone remember this song? I was on McInnes Island when I first saw the movie “A Clockwork Orange [1971]” and heard the song. We did not have a TV station, but we did have a TV and a cassette player.
http://youtu.be/dKhso6odZpI Continue reading Video – I Want to Marry A Lighthousekeeper
When my wife Karen and I started on Pulteney Point in 1969 the house was supplied with a beautiful white porcelain enamel Enterprise oil cook stove. Ms. Enterprise had a “polished cast iron cook top, roomy storage drawer, even heat porcelain oven, no-fog oven window” 1 and a high shelf above the cooking surface. As the lighthouse generators ran on diesel, the stove (and oil-burning furnace) had been modified for burning this fuel.
Never having used one of these stoves before we did not not have very good luck cooking on it at first. This talent improved over the years and later we had great success with our cooking and we fell in love with our oil stove. Continue reading The Love of My Life – Ms. Enterprise!
Kerosene to Electricity
In the early days of lighthouses all lighting was by kerosene lamps with wicks or mantles.
When electricity first came to the lights it was only for running the main light and occasionally for operation of the foghorn solenoids. Sometimes a knowledgeable principal keeper would wire in a light to his house – a single cable hanging from the ceiling with a small wattage bulb – usually in the kitchen.
Later came large generators and a bit more power. I say a bit more. My first lightstation at Pulteney Point had a 5 KW Kato generator run by a two-cylinder Lister diesel engine which supplied power to the main light, radio, and foghorn controls. The rest was left to be split between the three keeper’s houses. In 1969 our house was only one year old but had one electrical outlet per room and only two fused circuits per house, which of course ran the lights and electrical outlets. Continue reading What You Take For Granted – Electricity, Water, Heating
This is the information that started the whole Lighthouse Memories website. In 2005 I started to collect the names of lighthouse keepers, and the stations they had manned. Because of this list people sent me stories, documents and photos and the website was born.
Click on the photo below to see the database pages and a link to the Database.
This is a promotion for my friend Frank Statham’s website Rough Radio – Wireless on the British Columbia Coast.
As I started off collecting lighthouse keeper names for genealogy records, Frank started with a collection of photographs, and with his past work as a radio operator, his interest was sparked into creating a website to help people remember the early days of radio on the BC coast. He also has been keeping a list of station personnel which you will find here.
The quotes below from Frank’s website show that lighthouses came first, but with the advent of radio, the two worked closely together, in fact sometimes so close together that they were on the same station – e.g. Estevan Point or Pachena Point.
“At the end of the 19th Century, the west coast of Canada was dangerous place for the movement of vessels. There was little European settlement along the coast north of Victoria. The only navigational aids for vessel traffic consisted of a scattering of lighthouses.”
“The 1907 Canadian Dominion Government, in an effort to provide some measure of safety for mariners, implemented a plan to provide a life saving trail along the Juan de Fuca Strait Vancouver Island, lifeboat stations, and wireless radio stations. The first five wireless stations, Vancouver, Victoria, Pachena Point and Estevan Point were all operational by January 1908.” Continue reading →
Some photo samples from Frank’s website below:
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The article below was written in 2003 by Sherrill Kitson, wife of the lightkeeper Rene Kitson, and herself a qualified lightkeeper at the time.
This story will illustrate why lightkeepers, and not electronic sensors, are better weather observers. We can smell the fog, and many a mariner will back us up on that statement.
Now, all we can do is smell the fog, and hope that nobody gets hurt because there are no more foghorns.
(The text below is in a picture. If it is too hard too read, hold down the CTRL key (STRG in Deutsch) and rotate the wheel on your mouse forward or back to increase the photo size – it works on most computers and operating systems.)
The story is reprinted here with permission of Fisheries and Oceans Canada from their publication Shorelines 2003 (which does not appear to be available online – if anyone knows a link, please let me know).