Trip to the lighthouse

(This lighthouse is really neat so this blog will be a bit larger than normal and include a lot of pictures.) PS. click on a picture and it gets bigger.

We took the dinghy over to the lighthouse and met up with some friends of ours for a self guided tour of the lighthouse.


Let’s go up and have a look see.


The lighthouse is not lit up by an electric light it’s a kerosene flame that produces the light. This is similar to the light produced by a Colman lantern.
The kerosene is poured into a series of tanks and then pressurized and pumped up to the burner to produce the flame.

The tools that they use are kept in a curved storage cabinet (so that it would sit better against the curved wall) just beneath the lens room.

At the top of the tower you had to crawl through a small door to get out onto the catwalk. It was a great view from the top of the tower. We could see the whole harbor and Elbow Cay.

In the distance (about 5 miles is Abaco island and Marsh Harbor.


This lens is a First Order Fresnel lenses and stands about 6 feet high. It can focus the light from the flame and cast it over 15 miles out to sea.

Here’s the burner inside of the lens housing.

The entire lens rotates around the flame and it rides on a bearing surface made of mercury! It had such low friction that I was able to rotate the entire affair (several thousand pounds) with a single finger!


These gears act like a wind up clock to turn the light all night long. The light keeper comes up here every night and lights the lamp, winds up the weight and starts it rotating. Talk about low tech!

Now you might wonder where the kerosene tank is...We found it on the dock, well we found lots of them. It turns out that they have to carry 5 gal jerry cans of kerosene up the tower to refill the pressure tanks.
Hope that you enjoyed the tour.