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Point Reyes Lighthouse — Description

This is Point Reyes Lighthouse, the closest point in California to Eynhallow island. It’s the second foggiest place in North America, right behind Grand Banks Newfoundland, where the Titanic sank. Number 3 is Cape Disappointment, Washington. Point Reyes is also the windiest place on the Pacific Coast, and has clocked hurricane-force winds. Wind. Fog. At the same time. Almost as if some telepath or other is deliberately obscuring visibility in the area.

The lighthouse was built in 1870 and retired in 1975. Now it’s a tourist attraction with a highest recorded windspeed of 133 mph, which is a Cat 4. In fact they had to build the keeper’s house twice, because when they completed the first one, it got blown off the cliff and they had to start again. The light itself is a first-order Fresnel lens, which is the biggest ever made, made in France and sailed around Cape Horn by steamer in 1867. It ran off of a mineral oil lamp that had five wicks. Mr. Augustin-Jean Fresnel, the inventor of the wave-theory of light, found a way to make the little flickering flame of a candle so bright that you had to look at it with smoked glasses, the equivalent of our modern eclipse glasses. It could be seen from horizon to horizon, 24 miles. If I had to guess, you could probably see them from space. Fresnel did all this before he died of tuberculosis at age 39. Car brake lights and headlights still use Fresnel lenses, by the way.

The Point Reyes lighthouse lens mechanism was like an enormous windup clock, with a 175 pound weight ticking it’s way to the bottom and rotating the 6000 pound lens at one revolution every 2 minutes. The lighthouse keeper would wind it up every night, top up all the oil reservoirs, and let ‘er rip. 24 beams of near-laser would rotate over the ocean all night long. During the legendary 1906 earthquake, the entire lighthouse moved north 18 feet during the initial shock. All that building to compensate for the shear wind force had paid off though, and the only damage to the light was that the lens slipped off it’s track. The keepers quickly repaired it that afternoon and had it running as usual by sunset.

The Old Grey Fog Bane of the Farallons’ weekly adventures continue here .