Maine lighthouse oddities

Maine is a fairly easy place to navigate by boat provided:

 

• You have good visibility
• You know where you are
• Your charts and chart plotter are up to date
• You don’t fuck up
   
  What’s different about navigating in Maine is that, unlike most of California, a “grounding” is usually catastrophic.  You don’t hit nice soft sand or mud, you hit something like this:
   
    or this  
   
  In nautical terms the above are known as #@%&**&$#@  rocks.  They will ruin your day (and your hull) if you whack one.  Sailors realized this problem very early on, and to this day boaters go to great lengths to avoid hitting them (duh).  Today, with radar and GPS, you really don’t have any excuse for smashing into the rocks. Way back when, it was a different matter altogether.  Shipping was the lifeblood to the early Maine economy; hence sailors usually got what they needed to help ensure safe passage of goods and materials.  To wit; nav aids.  There are two land based low technology principal aids.  First, the lighthouse (of which there are no less than 57 in Maine alone):
   
  
   

This is the Fort Point lighthouse (Stockton Springs, Maine), Fort Point Light was established in 1836 in Stockton Springs, at the west side of the mouth of the Penobscot River, to aid vessels bound for Bangor, a leading lumber port. The town of Stockton Springs was also a lumber port and a shipping point for Maine's potato industry.  Not only is that, but the land it sits on gorgeous.  “Because of its beautiful and accessible location, Fort Point Light was a sought-after station for keepers. A total of only four men kept the light from the 1880s into the 1930s.” Did you happen to notice that the tower is square?  The stairs aren’t:

“They had an old spiral staircase available, but the plans had called for a square outside. So they made it round for the staircase and then square to match the plans.”

I wish that whoever in government had the smarts to make that decision was still working today.

 

Lighthouses need a source of light to make them work (otherwise they’d be called darkhouses).  Back then, all they had available was oil to burn.  In fact, the original fuel for the Fort Point Lighthouse was whale oil. The problem with oil lamps is pretty obvious – they aren’t very bright (insert your own joke here).  Enter the Fresnel lens  “ The Fresnel lens is the 1822 invention of French physicist Augustine Fresnel”  Tests showed that while an open flame lost nearly 97% of its light, and a flame with reflectors behind it still lost 83% of its light, the Fresnel lens was able to capture all but 17% of its light. Because of its amazing efficiency, a Fresnel lens could easily throw its light 20 or more miles to the horizon.  Fresnel lens were (and still are) expensive.  I have no idea how they managed to grind them back before the invention of the computer-controlled 5 axis grinder. The first Fresnel lens was used in 1823 (in France – go figger). In essence, a Fresnel lens can be made much thinner than a comparable conventional lens:

 

  The weight of “2” (above) would be totally impractical (if even possible).

 

 The Fresnel produces a nice flat beam that can be seen for miles.  There are many sizes of Fresnel lenses, called 'orders', the largest being a first order, which is made up of hundreds of glass prisms. The lenses decrease in size through second order, third order, etc.  This is a first order Fresnel:

 

 Its 7 foot 10 inches tall.

 

Ft. Point didn’t have the money to buy a first order Fresnel.  They had to settle for a Fourth order.  A Fourth order is around 2 ½ feet tall and looks like this:

 

 

Did I mention they’re expensive? A Fourth order lens is worth 2 ½ million dollars and will require the services of a Fresnel lens technician (at the tune of $8,000 a year) to maintain.  The light was automated in 1988 (boo, hiss).

 

 

The second land-based low tech nav aid is the lowly bell.

 

 As a light house keeper, I imagine you could learn to sleep quite well (getting up every so often to refill the oil reservoir and shoot the occasional roosting pigeon or seagull) on clear nights.  When the fog rolled in – it was headache time.  You guessed it, the bell had to be rung (day OR night).  Fortunately the lighthouse keeper didn’t have to bash the damn thing with a mallet himself. This is the bell tower (which looks like a giant metronome to me)

 It’s kind of a curious looking structure until you look inside. 

 

 

 Turn the crank to raise the weight, then let gravity power the automatic bell whacker. I would imagine that it took an enormous amount of self-control and professionalism for the lighthouse keeper to re-crank the weight up during a spell of bad weather lasting several days. In fact, I bet it would be hard to tell who was happier that the fog finally lifted – the sailors or the keeper. I wonder how many of them went insane?

 

On a final note, not all lighthouses are big tall structures.  I saw this one a few days earlier in Casco Bay (Portland). This is the Pocahontas lighthouse.  6 feet tall.

 

 It’s real (and official).  The light can be seen for 800 whole feet on a moonless night.