Craighill Keeper’s bLog

Bwahaha - bet you never heard that one before?!

Newsletter will be going out to members soon. I will be formalizing a couple dates for volunteer members to come out this summer. You must be a member to volunteer and sign a waiver. I won’t sugarcoat the effort involved in going out and of course, it’s completely subject to weather/bay conditions. Another volunteer day with the Chesapeake Chapter of the US Lighthouse Society will be coordinated as well.

And hey, we’re looking for new members always! You don’t even need manual labor skills. We could always use help writing newsletters, making phone calls, coordinating events, fundraising ideas, you-name-it! (ability to string together solar panels from scraps and hook up to marine batteries with charge controllers and inverters a bonus skill)

The website is not SEO friendly (geek speak for search engine optimized) and hasn’t changed since it launched in 2005. So it will be redesigned over the next month to encourage more interaction and make updates easier and information easy to find, retaining the history aspect. Then hopefully we’ll get some more videos up.

We’re looking for a work boat or ~20+ ft. pontoon boat (flat deck - no wraparound seating) with motor to be donated for use as a work boat. The lil yellow Spongebob boat is great for transportation and shuttling smaller items, but not for working on the lower end of the lighthouse, which also needs repainting and welding work on the platform. We need something big, flat, and stable that won’t bounce around quite as much and can get there under its own power. Email ctaylor at historicalplace dot org. Thanks!

Social media is all the rage! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook! We may have been the first lighthouse to blog, but St. Augustine Lighthouse was on Twitter before us.

Remember our beautiful ladder and easy access that finally got installed last season? I should have known better. Really, I should have. After researching lighthouse after lighthouse destroyed by ice on the Chesapeake while writing the Maryland’s Lighthouses book, I knew the power of ice and the destruction it could leave in its wake. As I said in my last post, winter surprised us and we needed to get out and pull the ladder up. Unfortunately, the surprise winter blast sent the region plunging into an unusual deep freeze that it didn’t recover from for quite some time. By then the damage was done and it was too late. The first sign was a channel marker piling right outside the marina that is tilted at a 45* angle. I assumed a boat had hit it hard or something, but learned later it was a victim of ice. I was soon to find out the lighthouse was not spared the wrath of the moving building ice floes either once we arrived. My worst fears waiting out winter had been realized.

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