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A brighter lighthouse

A U.S. Coast Guard team donates its time to install a new lens and other equipment at the the Anclote Key Lighthouse.

By RICHARD DANIELSON
Published December 9, 2004

ANCLOTE KEY - The lighthouse beacon here shines much brighter these days, thanks to some 19th-century optical technology and time donated by the U.S. Coast Guard.

A Coast Guard volunteer team from St. Petersburg this week finished making adjustments to a new lamp, more powerful lens and other equipment at the lighthouse.

"The thing looks like a diamond sitting up in the lantern room with the sun glistening off of it," said Mike Hancock of the Gulf Islands Alliance Citizens Support Organization.

Starting in the 1980s, the alliance, along with the Tampa Bay Harbour Lights collector club, lobbied legislators to restore the lighthouse and raised money for a $1.5-million renovation project.

The lighthouse beacon was relit in September 2003, though not with the all the optical equipment it has now.

A new key component is an updated version of the Fresnel lens originally installed in the lighthouse when it was built in 1887.

French physicist Augustin Fresnel was a pioneer in optical theory. In the early 1800s, he led the way in using compound lenses instead of mirrors in lighthouses. Original Fresnel lenses were masterworks in crystal that could take the light from a single oil lamp and project it miles away.

"We've shifted over to plastic lenses in modern beacons, but it's the same technology," said Coast Guard Chief R.J. Storle, the officer in charge of the guard's Aids to Navigation Team in St. Petersburg.

The lighthouse's new lens was built by a company in Jacksonville and consists of acrylic lenses in a brass frame, Storle said.

To install the new equipment, purchased as part of the renovation project, Hancock enlisted the help of Storle's team. The team is responsible for maintaining 1,500 buoys, lights, markers and other pieces of navigational equipment. It also maintains four working lighthouses, though not the Anclote Key Lighthouse, which was decommissioned and abandoned in 1985.

Hancock, 66, of Clearwater wasn't a stranger to the unit. He is a retired Coast Guard chief warrant officer who helped determine that the Anclote Key Lighthouse was no longer needed for navigation.

The team has an interest in preserving significant pieces of navigational history and last year won a Coast Guard award for its efforts, Storle said.

"When we approach this thing it's a little bit more than a community service project," he said. "It's our legacy."

Coast Guard volunteers began installing the new lens on Nov. 15. The pedestal and motor weigh about 200 pounds, and the lens and frame weigh another 100 to 150 pounds, Storle said. All had to be carried up a spiral staircase just 23 inches wide.

"I brought a couple of my biggest guys out there," Storle said. "We brought it up the old-fashioned way."

This week, the team returned to make some final adjustments. With a new, brighter 50-watt bulb and the Fresnel lens, the lighthouse's beacon now can be seen from 16 or 17 miles away.

The lens rotates once every 30 seconds, and two of its six panels are blacked out, so the beacon appears to flash on and off, Storle said. It continues to rotate even in the daytime, because if it stayed still, sunlight could be focused through it intensely enough to start a fire.

Two good vantage points for seeing the new light are Fred H. Howard Park and Sunset Beach Park in Tarpon Springs, he said.

Storle said his unit was happy to be able to take part in helping install the optical equipment, which adds impressive new candlepower to a lighthouse that once was rusted, broken and covered with graffiti.

"It was just a disaster," he said, "and the amount of work they've done out there is just phenomenal."

[Last modified December 8, 2004, 22:25:05]