Today's topic is lighthouses and their value to sea kayakers, not only as signaling devices at night and in fog, but also their value as daytime landmarks and as a teaching tool for how to read nautical charts nautical charts with a sharp, accurate eye and an inquisitive sense of curiosity.
A minor 20th-century American poet (Ira Sadofff) once wrote that "as a symbol of loneliness, even a lighthouse has its limits", but it's the element of aloneness that many associate with lighthouses: remoteness, solitude, an overlook of likely bad weather and, until the mid-1900's in North America, a family on an island or scrap of ledge island tending to a revolving beacon. For sea kayakers, lighthouses have a variety of uses and values. The most obvious is their value as nighttime landmarking signals. Paddling at night, trying to feel our way down a remote coastline in the fog, when the lighthouse's foghorn is most likely to be emitting its low mournful call, the lighthouse lets us know where we're near. As a practical matter, truth being that few kayakers paddle night and most tend to head for shore at dusk or when the fog rolls in, it's more valuable to learn how lighthouses how are represented on charts. They're encoded according to their height, flash pattern and range, and these details are of value to kayakers for a whole host of reasons. Let's take a look at a lighthouse in person, or in the light of day, as it were: Gurnet Light, perched on top of a sandy bluff and terminal glacial moraine along the northern shores of Plymouth Bay, in Massachusetts. Gurnet Light looms over the end of this lengthy and spare barrier beach on the south coast of Massachusetts, in maritime New England. Built in 1862, the light has been moved a couple of times from one section of the scarp which forms end of the spit barrier beach's southwestern shore. The scarp and cliffs are periodically undermined and collapse in the windstorms and nor'east gales New England is known for. Like almost every lighthouse in North America, the Gurnet Light is no longer manned, although the keepers house still stands. The light is powered by an array of solar panels; the short, stubby light, made of wooden clapboards, has a catwalk around the lens housing, and off to one side an electronic eye, which flashes a signal towards land to measure the dew point and range of visibility. Once range of visibility is reduced to a half mile by fog, rain, snow or darkness, the light is activated. Let's take a look at the light's salient use to local sea kayakers, value which comes not so much that the light is illuminated at night or in times of limited visibility, but rather, at how the light is depicted on a nautical chart. The chart tells us the light's flash pattern, height, range of visibility, and perhaps most important, shows around the northeast corner of the bluff, there's a beach to land on that is protected from winds from the west. Just as important, the chart show us that, around the northwest corner of the light, there's a second beach, good for landing, that is fully protected from swell, seas and surf generated by weather to the southeast, east, and northeast.
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