Hope Town Light

February 29, 2008

Day and Night at the Hope Town Lighthouse

We walked, unguided by anyone, the 101 spiral steps to the top of the iconic, Hope Town lighthouse, one of the last kerosene-fueled lighthouse lamps in the world. At the top of our climb, we crawled through an opening of only about three by four feet onto a narrow, circular balcony that rimmed the 89 feet above the ground. This acrophobic perch gave a spectacular view of Hope Town Harbor, overexposed by my misadjusted camera, which will require another visit.

Hope Town light house doesn’t turn on, it comes to life. For several nights, from our boat in the Harbor we had watched a soft yellow glow kindle from within the lens, slowly build and brighten, then hold for a few minutes before the lens would begin to rotate, flashing five times every 15 seconds. We had heard from another boater that you could watch it being lit. We asked, and a lighthouse keeper invited us to return at about six that evening.

Jeffrey is a giant of a man, well over six feet. He loomed in the dusk as he came out of the keepers’ house, stretched and walked to where we were waiting at the door at the base of the tower. He wasn’t the keeper we had spoken to, but welcomed us, gestured we should go ahead of him and we entered the dark interior. He followed, closed the door from the inside with a bang and locked it before switching unseen bulbs that cast a dim yellow light. Wooden stairs on a spiral iron frame line the interior walls of the tower. We began climbing, Jeffrey behind, shutting and latching casement windows on the way up. About half way, a landing holds two, iron tanks painted a dark, boiler-room green, each holding 50 gallons of kerosene that the keepers carry up the spiral stairs to fill them. They are pressurized by a hand pump. His flashlight illuminated the white dial pressure gauge on the reserve tank that read 60 psi, the tank actively feeding the lamp above read 80 psi. The lighthouse would burn two-and-one-half gallons that night. Two quarter inch copper tubes snake from the tanks up upward to the lamp above.

Go ahead, he said and we climbed higher on the spiral stairs to another platform, about 15 feet below the lamp where a more vertical straight, ladder-like stair rises to the platform beneath the lamp that holds the mechanism that supports and rotates the lens above. Jeffrey closed the portal that we had crawled through earlier in the day that leads to the outside balcony that surrounds the lighthouse window.

He climbed three more ladder rungs to another circular platform that lies at the base of the lens about six feet above where we stood. From there he stretched to remove a curtain that hung around the entire circumference of the lens. It was nearly dark and the lens could no longer destroy itself by concentrating the sun’s rays into lens-cracking heat and fire.

He invited us to climb the three steel ladder rungs to the upper platform and he went through an opening in the glass lens and sat inside. He poured a small amount of fuel in a cup and lit it beneath the generator, the pipes that vaporize the kerosene before it flows into a silk mantle, only a little larger than a Coleman lantern mantle. Once the mantle is lit, its heat vaporizes the fuel.

We watched this rite unfold from a two foot circular platform at the base of the lens, our backs to the growing dark on the outside of the iron-mullioned, lattice windows as we watched Jeffrey, his face aglow in the flame heating the generator that flickered in facets of the lens. He told us his father had been the light keeper for thirty years before he began the work four years ago. There are two keepers that alternate dusk to midnight and midnight to dawn shifts. The Bahamian government wanted to automate the light a few years ago, but protests from many quarters stopped it. He told us there are two other lighthouses with keepers, six men in all.

A smoking vapor emitted from the mantle, and Jeffrey warned us it will be bright as he touched flame to mantle and it ignited, brilliant yellow-white. He turned a knob, it dimmed and brightened; did it again, cleaning the orifices that feed the gas to the mantle, an action that produces the hesitancy in the light that we had witnessed from watching it from afar. We descended from the upper platform to the one below, where the clock-work machinery is housed beneath the lens. It was surprisingly dark even though only a few feet above us, the Fresnel lens concentrates the light of the mantle into beams of 325,000 foot candles that can be seen from over 17 miles away. The pause we had witnessed between when the light is lit and it begins to flash, is the time for the keeper to descend from the lens and free the escapement that allows the lens to rotate, drawing its momentum from a weight descending about 50 feet in a greased six-inch pipe. He inserted a crank, and like a thumbscrew in a clock face, wound the weight’s cable on a drum to raise the weight, a job that must be done every two hours of the night.

What is new to say about a light house? Our Maine coast is dotted with them, spaced so one is always visible. There are diaries of light-house keepers and their wives, lighthouse candles and lamps, innumerable bad vacation-art paintings of lighthouse, a ponderous and pompous PBS fly-over documentary on lighthouses, lighthouses converted to inns and museums, lighthouse photographs and postcards and numerous volunteer associations that preserve them from ruin. Nearly all are automated with solar panels and sensors, and they are redundant if not made anachronistic by modern, satellite-based navigation equipment.

We’ve been lighthouse saturated, so why was this evening so moving for both of us? Certainly, to witness up close the physical beauty and elegant simplicity of design and mechanism. But most of all it was to witness a rite of unambiguous human virtue: one person undertaking a tangible, thankless and arduous duty, night after night, that has no other purpose than to guide unknown others to safety.

March 2, 2008

We’ve reserved a mooring from mid-March through mid-April in Hope Town which will serve as our base camp for cruising the Sea of Abaco. We left Hope Town yesterday afternoon and tacked north for only a few miles to Man-O-War Cay (that’s the way the charts spell it), to a marina here to bring our batteries back to full capacity, take on water and weather the continuing hard blows from the south.

Man-O-War Cay offers a third category of Bahamian Cay. Few of the salt box old houses remain, replaced by single story, pleasant, but unremarkable homes, interspersed in the settlement and throughout the island with the ubiquitous new summer homes of colored tin roofs and balconies.

On our dock we ran into some people we had met in Elizabeth City, NC, months ago who have rented a mooring here for the season. She was chagrinned that Man-O-War Cay “doesn’t have blacks, booze, or bikinis.” The cruising guide notes that no liquor is sold and women should not wear scanty clothes. We and they saw no black residents, only a few Haitians about who arrive and depart daily by ferry. A full time population, that couldn’t exceed 400, supports in manicured condition a Church of God, a Church of the Brethren, Gospel Chapel and New Life Bible Church. The women zip around in golf carts dressed in over-the-knee length floral print house dresses like housewives wore in the 1950’s. One of the cruising boats moored in the Harbor was named Christian. We took a Sunday afternoon walk and no one was about. The place seemed deserted. We ran into a man who was raking leaves along a road who lives here and in Florida who said this is a “very conservative place.” Golf carts have bumper stickers with sad faces and smiley faces – before and after of being saved. An entrepreneurial family named Albury controls the regional ferry service, builds very fine center-counsel boats, owns the lumber yard and several other businesses. It seems a throwback to the inbred, clannish Quakers of Nantucket who combined the rigors of righteousness with cut-throat control of whaling.

March 5, 2008

We are anchored in Buckaroon Bay, south in the Sea of Abaco, having spent last night off of Tiloo Cay just south of Hope Town after we left Man-O-War Cay the day before. We are reunited with Troubadour and Sea Duck. While at Man-O-War, Ed of Troubadour went by our slip in his dinghy. Great reunion with he and Nancy, now back from Boston having seen and served child and new grand daughter. We agreed to sail south together and to our further delight, learned that Sea Duck was anchored off of Tiloo Cay. We all snorkeled over modest reefs, and had a great reunion with the flotilla that first made contact at West End a month ago. We gathered that evening on Sea Duck to watch on CNN, via Steve’s satellite connection, some of the primary election returns…more laughter and talk than serious politics.

At Buckaroon Bay, for the first time in a month the wind is still. It has been howling out of the southeast, 20 knots plus, non stop for days. We beat our way down here this morning, reefed main and jib, close hauled, doing 6.5 to 7 knots in 80 degree temperatures, watching the bottom five or six feet below the keel and anchored with a foot and half under us with it still blowing 20 plus. We’ve been flying a riding sail on moorings and at anchor which prevents Journey from sashaying her stern about and preventing her broadsides from flashing to the wind and putting more strain on the anchor rode.

The calm was short lived. As I write, lightening flashes all around us and then again the moan in the rigging and we’ve turned 180 degrees, bow north, pitch black out side, temperature dropping and wondered whether to re-set the anchor. Seems like the stationary cold front is no longer stationary and we are exposed to the north.

March 8, 2007

That was only a squall two nights ago, not the cold front. We swung 180 degrees back to south and it blew hard all night. We learned from Ed in the morning that on Troubadour they had fought a fire, emptying two extinguishers caused by a short in the starter solenoid. Ed had spent all night rewiring, making repairs and had his engine running. He and Nancy were exhausted, but fine.

We had hoped to head south to Little Harbor with Troubadour, but Marsh Harbor services were required for repairs. We stayed an extra day in Buckaroon bay while the crew of Troubadour rested, and yesterday Journey and Troubadour sailed with the wind blowing 20 to 28 knots behind us the 16 miles to Marsh Harbor. It was full and we anchored on the edge of the flotilla of sailboats in the hard packed, sand-mud-shell bottom that is thankfully, a superb holding ground, a good thing in that it blew 20 knots or better all night last night, and a cold front is predicted with gust over 30 later today.

Studies in Anchoring

The Bahamas make anchoring studies easily accessible. The hook is dropped in water rarely deeper than 10 feet at high tide, the water is crystal clear, and you don’t have a heart attack plopping in with fins, mask and snorkel to grade your work.

Journey’s anchor rode is 50 feet of chain attached to 250 feet of three-strand, five-eighths inch nylon line. The chain is attached to the much praised (knock-on-wood) Rocna Anchor. We let out about seventy feet of scope, plenty for 10 feet of depth.

The first observation is the wonder that the anchor holds at all. The triangular shaped anchor digs in and stays upright and the weight of the chain keeps its shank lying flat on the bottom. When set, it digs a furrow of five or ten feet, then it must compact in front of it enough sand, shell, mud to hold 18,000 pounds of boat in full throttle reverse, the procedure for setting the anchor. When we don’t move backwards an inch and the rode becomes and stays iron taut, we know its set, and so far, it holds when waves and wind drives Journey’s bow over, pushes on her side and she pulls hard on the rode.

We set an anchor watch on the GPS so that it beeps if we move 120 feet, which it did twice the other night when we did the 360 over a couple of hours in the passing squall.
The holding power of the little anchor gives all the more confidence in the 3,000 pound granite block and heavy chain that make up our moorings in Maine.

The second observation is how much chance is involved in where you drop. Here you can see stuff, but not when we let go commonly in 20 to 30 feet of plankton opaque water of Maine. My first days swim on the anchor at Buckaroon revealed the chain laid 20 feet from a sunken, drift wood smooth tree trunk with its roots forming a mini reef for fish.

Day two at the Bay M. suggested to Jaque that he snorkel over the anchor to be sure it hadn’t caught in the tree, which, being the noted undersea explorer, he doubted it had. By golly, the chain lay over the tree and it was nearly snagged on the roots. We drove Journey to the side, moving the chain up the smooth trunk, pulled it in, relocated and reset.

The third lesson is how nice the nylon-chain combination works. With 70 feet of scope, the chain in 20 knots plus of wind will lay flat for two thirds of its length, with the end lifting so the nylon line doesn’t rub on the bottom. The line’s elasticity serves as a good shock absorber, dampening the impact of gusts and waves.

Reunion with our inspirers

On our approach to March Harbor yesterday, with great delight we picked up a child’s voice hailing on the VHF radio: “Journey, Journey – Mysterious Ways.” It was Allister, Charlotte, and parents Scott and Johanna, the family mentioned before we met three years ago, then followed their journey last year down the ICW to the Bahamas, met them in Oriental, NC when we linked with Roland last May and saw them again on their north when they stopped in Port Clyde.

They had taken a spring vacation from the snows of Nova Scotia to revisit the Bahamas and were going to spend the day visiting Hope Town. We had been hoping to be in touch. They used the call sign of their boat to hail us on a friends VHF.

We took a ferry from Marsh Harbor to Hope Town and we spent an afternoon of eating, drinking, talk about the Bahamas, sailing, and the afterlife of a cruising year, and watched the kids swim at the glorious beach on the Atlantic side of Elbow Cay. They played “Sea Tow” a game they invented that was inspired by the tow boat service that all cruisers get to know. One would swim aground and the other pull him or her off the shoal.