The following story is the first of two parts on the Cape Canaveral lighthouse by Judy Lovell, a photographer extraordinaire, who runs a WordPress blog called Janthina Images.
Besides this article, and the one following, please view her image gallery on her website as well. In the gallery she has some lovely photos of Florida lighthouses with prints available for sale. Enjoy, and drop by her website occasionally for different articles. If you wish to view the image gallery as a slideshow, please click here.
They fill that night with Knowledge. A thousand ships go by, A thousand captains bless them, so bright and proud and high: The world’s dark capes they glamour; or low on sand banks dread, They, crouching, mark a pathway between the Quick and Dead — Like star points in the ether They bring the seamen ease, These Lords of Wind and Weather These Wardens of the Seas!
…Edwin James Brady…
Lighthouses have long stood at the edges of the world, lonely outposts maintained by devoted souls to ensure the safety of ships at sea. But, only one remarkable beacon was destined to illuminate the path for ships of space! But how did this happen? How did a lighthouse built on a hook of sand jutting out into the Atlantic to protect mariners from dangerous currents become a front row witness to the advent of the Space Age?
Do you want to visit some of British Columbia lighthouses? A lot of them are isolated, but there are a few that tourists can easily see. Some of these are manned; some are automated.
One of the best websites for finding the location of the lighthouses is Ron Ammundsen’s Lighthouses of British Columbia website. On the opening page he has maps of manned/staffed and unmanned lighthouses and their locations. This will show you what is available, and where they are located. To find photos and information on the chosen lighthouses check out Google.
One of the main items you will require is a place to stay. When flying to British Columbia via International Airlines (from another country) your point of entry would be Vancouver International Airport (YVR). From there you have a variety of ways to accommodate yourself – from hotel, motel, bed and breakfast, camp site, hostel, inn, resort, etc. Select from the list on the Hello BC website. Enter your dates, town, and preference, and select a place to stay. Really easy website to find your way around.
The next thing after a room for the night, is a place to eat. Canada is well-known for its diversity in the culinary arts, and British Columbia is no exception. The easiest way is to introduce you to a special webpage called Dining, again from Hello BC. This is an interactive menu connected to a BC map. Pick what type of food you want, where you want to eat, and wait for the results. It is well organized and easy to use.
The choice is amazing! Your selection may be saved as a PDF file for reference. Pick your town, pick your food and grab a cab to good dining. The nice thing is you can look on the map to see if a location is near your place of residence for any place in BC. The map (left) shows the 538 results from just selecting West Coast. Each red flag is a city with multiple locations in each. Each result will give you location, telephone number and website if available. A very comprehensive help page.
Fisgard Lighthouse
Before you come you should decide where you want to go, and what lighthouses you want to see. Most of the available lighthouses will be seen in and around the cities of Vancouver, and Victoria, BC. Others are visible from the ferries, and up and down Vancouver Island. On the Hello BC website on the Things To Do page there are no exact listings for lighthouses but if you type lighthouse in the search box (upper right) you will get a page of lighthouse listings, things lighthouse, resorts near lighthouses, etc. With the map from the website on Lighthouses of British Columbia you can then sort out where you want to go and which lighthouse you may wish to visit..
If you want to get off the beaten track, you can fly into many places or take ferries, hike in, or even rent a local water taxi or fish boat. The opportunities are unlimited depending on your time and finances. On the Hello BC webpage is also a section on Transportation and Maps listing many services available in BC.
Take your time, talk to other tourists, and if you have any questions, maybe I or other readers can help you out. They don’t call it Beautiful BC for nothing. Enjoy!
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To help you enjoy the coast more, it might be helpful to read up on a few of the things you might find at the shoreline. A great website for this is Vic High Marine. Check out the information on all things you might stumble across, or see on your trip.
Any more good advice out there? Please send it on and I will post it.
Probably most of you have heard of Legoland Parks. Like the Disney parks, they seem to be all over the world, but the one I am going to speak about is Legoland Park California at 1 Legoland Drive, Carlsbad, California, 92008, USA
Legoland Interactive Park Map
I have mentioned Lego lighthouses as model kits before in posts, but in this park there are large lighthouse replicas – one of mention is in the New England Harbour area (see the interactive map at the left).
One of the reasons for the establishment of a lighthouse is to mark the dangers from the effect of extreme tides (low and high) on surrounding lands, islands, waterways, and beaches.
Look at the photo on the left of my old lighthouse at McInnes Island at low tide (click for a larger version). We can tell it is low tide because the kelp is exposed on the rocks, and the high tide mark on the rocks is marked by a dirty black line. Here on the Pacific Coast of Canada, the tides come in and go out twice a day, and the range is between seventeen (17) and twenty-one (21) feet (6 to 7 meters)!
Note the small rock at dead center, bottom of the photo. At high tide that would be covered and become a menace to navigation. In this case this is not a marked shipping channel so no marker is necessary. The reason for the lighthouse (visible on the left of the large island) is that it was listed as a landfall light. A marker for ships coming in from the Pacific Ocean to the British Columbia coastline, and also a marker for the entrance to Milbanke Sound. It really doesn’t mark the island as dangerous; just an indicator of a mariner’s location on the ocean.
Example of a floating dock
To return to a docked boat on the BC coast after a few hours of sightseeing or shopping is sometimes a surprise for many tourists. The docks for the boats are built to float up and down on fixed pilings to accommodate the 21 foot tides (see photo left). To get onto the dock you walk up or down a ramp. A roller on the lower end rolls along the dock as the tide rises or falls. The top part of the ramp is hinged.
The tides change approximately every six hours, so if you left your boat and walked up the steep ramp to the topside dock at 10 AM (low tide) and came back at 2 PM (4 hours difference), the ramp would be almost horizontal (high tide). If you had lots of heavy groceries to move it was always a good idea to plan at what time of day you wanted to move them! Continue reading Tides→
Three Skeleton Key is a one act play I have never heard about before today. It was written as a short story by George G. Toudouze and was first published in 1937 in English.
This is a short story about three men who operate a lighthouse miles offshore of the South American coast. They love their job untill one day a strange ship arrives. Suddenly they are unsure if they will survive to see the next day.
Setting
This story is set on a “key” or small island several miles offshore of French Guianna in the early 1900s. Lighthouse operators whould spend months at a time isolated out on their tiny islands without any contact with the rest of the world. Continue reading Three Skeleton Key – A Lighthouse Play→
This article appeared in the Business Mirror (Philippines). Take a look at why they are refurbishing old lighthouses:
Lighthouses serve as aids to navigation, working as visual guides to ports and harbors especially for fishermen and even for larger types of vessels already equipped with global positioning system.
Any more questions why Canada’s lighthouses cannot be retained?
The amount in the title is 246 million Philippine Pesos (PHP) or about $5,904,000 Canadian Dollars (CDN).
“The DOTC is inviting providers to participate in the open and transparent bidding process for the P246 million procurement of aids to navigation equipment,” said the agency in a published bid notice. (The amount is 246 million Philippine Pesos (PHP) or about $5,904,000 Canadian Dollars (CDN).)
The government will procure in bulk the lighting and other component of this project to efficiently utilize its funds.
The civil works for the project will be bid out separately.
The DOTC and the PCG will repair and upgrade 194 lighthouses. Lighthouses serve as aids to navigation, working as visual guides to ports and harbors especially for fishermen and even for larger types of vessels already equipped with global positioning system.
In particular, the PCG listed lighthouses in the following areas where repairs and upgrade should be carried out at the soonest time possible. These are the lighthouses in Northern Luzon, National Capital Region, Southern Tagalog, Palawan, Bicol, Western and Eastern Visayas, Southwestern, Northern and Southeastern Mindanao. Continue reading DOTC Opens Bidding for P246-M Lighthouse Repair Project→
Elaine Graham remains the only resident among the historical buildings at Point Atkinson Lighthouse. Photograph by: NEWS photo, Lisa King
ELAINE Graham was raised in the slums of London, far from the multi-hued green of nature.
“There was nothing on my street when I was growing up,” she recalls. “I had lots of play-friends, loads of kids to play with, but there wasn’t even a geranium on a windowsill.”
Many years later, Graham is now surrounded by 75 hectares of the largest first-growth stand of coastal-elevation trees in the Lower Mainland. Her home is nestled among the remaining structures at the base of Point Atkinson Lighthouse, which stands on a craggy promontory at the edge of Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver.
She has spent half her life here, and is eager to tell the story of her neck of the woods.
Graham moved to the Point Atkinson Lighthouse station with her husband Donald and two young sons in 1980. Donald became the last of the lighthouse keepers at the site (along with senior keeper Gerry Watson) when the lighthouse was automated in 1996.
This post is very interesting. It comes from a lady, Kathleen Ernst, who with her husband performs docent duty1 on an automated lighthouse in the United States. She has also written a historically-accurate non-fiction crime novel about the same lighthouse. I asked her permission to reprint the article 2 in full for you, which was given freely, so it is reprinted below for your enjoyment. What a retirement job!.
My husband Scott and I are recently back from our 4th stint as docents at Pottawatomie Lighthouse in Rock Island State Park, WI.
Rock Island is situated off the northern tip of Door County in Lake Michigan, and Pottawatomie is the state’s oldest light station. The current lighthouse, built in 1858, was magnificently restored by the Friends of Rock Island in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. It sits on top of a bluff on the northern end of Rock Island, over a mile from the boat landing and campground. There are no roads on the island, and it takes two ferry rides to get there. As docents, we give tours to guests from 10 AM to 4 PM each day. Since Scott and I both love history, and telling stories, it’s a great gig. We’re also responsible for housekeeping chores.
Otherwise, we get to live at the lighthouse. How cool is that?
There’s no electricity or indoor plumbing. (That’s Scott filling an Igloo at the old pump, in the rain.) But we have a fridge and stove powered by bottled gas, and we get to sleep in the keepers’ bedroom.
We have lots of quiet evenings. Lots of time for an impressionable writer to ponder stories of long-gone keepers, and to imagine the lighthouse as it once was.
So it was pretty much inevitable that I would write a book about the lighthouse.
In The Light Keeper’s Legacy (coming in October [2012]), my protagonist Chloe Ellefson is invited to serve as a guest curator at Pottawatomie Lighthouse. She’s excited about the job and eager for some solitude in such a beautiful, remote place. Needless to say, since this is a murder mystery, her time on Rock Island isn’t quite as peaceful as she’d hoped. Writing the book let me explore some new personal issues for Chloe, who is struggling to figure out what she wants from life. And it let me write an homage to the strong individuals who lived on Rock Island in the 19th century. The Light Keeper referenced in the title is Emily Betts, a real and totally awesome woman who served as Assistant Keeper at Pottawatomie. (In the National Archives photo below, that’s Emily barely visible in the doorway.)
The book also showcases the complexities of managing natural resources over the years. And it let me share a very special place with readers—some of whom will, I hope, decide to visit Rock Island and support ongoing restoration projects.
1 docent: A person who acts as a guide, typically on a voluntary basis, in a museum, art gallery, or zoo.
2 The article was originally displayed on the Ink Spot blog which describes itself as a corps of crime fiction authors, so if you like crime fiction then check out their webpages.
TAIPEI–Twelve out of the 34 lighthouses in Taiwan and its outlying islands, including three known as the “Northern Taiwan Triangle,” will be opened for public visits on June 30, as the end of an era in lighthouse management draws to a close.
The Directorate General of Customs (DGOC), which is under the Ministry of Finance, supervises Taiwan’s border facilities and opens several lighthouses for public visits every year to mark Tax Day and introduce people to Taiwan’s lighthouse culture, said Hung Kuo-ching, head of the DGOC’s Department of Maritime Affairs.
– as told to me by Mike Gallagher – deckhand and acting skipper “W. H. Pierce” and mate on the “Thomas Crosby IV”.
The following guestbook entry was received by Ron Ammundsen, webmaster of the BC Lighthouse web pages and forwarded to me. It was signed by Michael Gallagher.
Between 1952-56 in the summers, I was aboard the “William H. Pierce” with Dr. George Darby out of Bella Bella (now Waglisla). We went ashore at most lighthouses from Boat Bluff south to Egg Island , sometimes for medical reasons, sometimes to take magazines, have tea and talk . . . mainly listen.
WH Pierce at pointer island c. 1953 - photo Mike Gallagher
After Ron forwarded the entry to me I contacted Mike and asked if he had any stories for my Lighthouse Memories webpage. He said:
Rocket Launch with Canaveral Lighthouse is courtesy NASA Continue reading Reprint – Cape Canaveral Light – Warden of the Sea, Launchpad to the Stars! 
