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Lightship RELIEF doing double-duty at her station, during the Swiftsure Sail Race. Nautilus II, Captain Harbine Monroe, Commodore of the Tacoma Yacht Club, at 5:43 rounding the lightship 30 May 1948. (She was three hours behind that famous Dorade. Nautilus II made up the difference and more to win on corrected time.) Fine photograph by Kenneth G. Ollar, Tacoma, WA, Click image to enlarge. From the archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society© |
“For decades boatmen headed for the Strait of Juan de Fuca were accustomed to the sight of the Swiftsure beacon fifteen and a half miles northwest of Tatoosh Island. Frequently, the lightship Relief could also be seen moored on the south side of the ship canal, a short distance inside the Chittenden Locks, for servicing.
The Swiftsure (WAL 536) was an inseparable part of our maritime scene. She took her name from the submerged bank on which she was stationed from 1900 until July 1961. She marked no navigation hazard—her 6,900-pound anchor was in 180 feet of water—but she was a symbol of safety and a communications center for fishermen and small vessels in need of guidance in bad weather. The light was elevated 65 feet above the sea and was visible 14 miles.
When the Coast Guard decided that the 133-foot craft was no longer needed off the mouth of the strait because of the increased power of the light at Cape Flattery and on Vancouver Island, the Swiftsure was transferred to another position fourteen miles down the Washington coast at Umatilla Reef. Renamed Umatilla, she later became the Relief and remained in service until 1 October 1968. After being decommissioned, the vessel was used as a museum in Gig Harbor until the Coast Guard sold her to a Portland ship dismantling firm.
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The COLUMBIA Lightship No. 88 This famous sentinel of the Columbia River entrance came around the Horn to her station in 1909. After 52 eventful years, she was decommissioned, sold, and finally located in a Seattle salvage yard. Funds were raised for her purchase. Through efforts of the Coast Guard her lenses, horns, bell, anchors, and chain were found and donated to the vessel. Postcard published by Photo'neil, Long Beach, WA. |
When the Swiftsure was moved to Umatilla Reef, 24 lightships were in service. The first one on the Pacific coast, the Columbia, was established in 1892, followed by the original beacon at Umatilla Reef six years later. In those days, when the lighthouse Service operated them, life aboard the vessel was extremely monotonous, and it was essential. That the men have some hobbies or take their work seriously. Chess-playing was a favorite pastime. One captain kept busy writing, another made ship models until he became interested in collecting marine specimens.
Long periods of duty at sea were reduced when the Coast Guard took over the lightships in 1939. After that crew members alternated 16 days of shore leave with 43 days onboard.
Clarence E. Sherman, who was for almost 40 years associated with the Aids to Navigation Division, told me a great deal about life aboard the lightships in an interview. “The worst job the mates had, was to find work for the men. They clean the paint over and over again and they were overhauling something constantly. It is surprising the members of the crew got along so well as they did, shut up by themselves on ships with no communication. Their only excitement was seeing smoke on the horizon. It relieved things when radio came in and they could have some entertainment.
“Isolated out there, the men had to be ingenious and know how to get by without help. If a simple thing broke they couldn’t send for a replacement, they had to know how to make substitutions.
Usually, food on board was very good, but it was a problem to keep supplies fresh before the diesel-electric ships came in. Drinking water in the early years was evaporated from seawater. This process required considerable coal. After a time it was found cheaper to make more trips with fresh water in the tender than to carry so much fuel.”
Romantic associations centered around the Umatilla Reef lightship after Archie Binns, Washington author, spent some time there and produced one of his novels, Lightship, as a result of his experience. The Columbia River sentinel gained literary recognition when John Fleming Wilson of Portland, featured it in short stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. The same vessel gained another kind of distinction when she parted moorings in a tremendous sea and was stranded on the Washington shore for 16 months.
Sherman could remember that episode from his boyhood, “I was taken to Fort Stevens on the Columbia in 1891 when I was six years old. My father, Edric L. Sherman, was a machinist on the construction of the south jetty and later was foreman. It was exciting around the Point Adams lifesaving station the morning after the lightship went aground. She had been anchored six miles offshore and, I suppose, blew in during the night. We couldn’t see the ship because she was on the sand behind Cape Disappointment. The weather was so bad curiosity-seekers were out to look at her.
“While the lightship lay on the beach I went over with fishermen and saw her. Everybody thought she was there to stay, but house-movers got a contract to dig her out of the sand, put her on blocks, roll her overland through the woods and dump her in the Columbia River.
We used to say that was the only trip a ship ever took in command of a house-mover. She went back in commission all right.”
Each lightship was brought in for overhaul after 11 months at sea, Sherman said, and the Relief took its place offshore. Considerable difficulty was experienced in finding a special radio-beacon set to equip the Relief because she had to have the characteristics of any station she took. Once Sherman was called out to the Swiftsure because of trouble with the air whistle and had to remain aboard several days in order to repair it. “The water was not rough, but the boat was never still. No matter how calm the sea, a lightship was always pitching; that was the nature of a vessel that led an unassuming life dangling at the end of a chain.
The men on board loved to have a visitor to gab with. At Swiftsure and the Columbia River the crews saw and talked to lots of fishermen, but boats were not supposed to hang onto a lightship. In foggy weather and sometimes in rain they might be given a line and the rule was relaxed.
A lightship never could leave its station. If a fisherman was observed in trouble, all that could be done was to send help by small boat, weather permitting.”
Another old-timer in aids-to navigation work was Leslie A. Leadbetter, who retired in 1950 after 34 years in the service. He commanded two of the lightships at various times, those at the Columbia and Umatilla Reef, and also the Relief. In 1910 his crew rescued eleven men in a lifeboat from a wreck on Tillamook bar. The refugees stayed aboard the Columbia five or six days before means were found to send them to Astoria. Once Captain Leadbetter kept a crew member in cold packs 24 hours while waiting for a chance to send him ashore for an appendicitis operation.
Captain Leadbetter told me that his most exciting memory was of the time a Japanese submarine shelled Fort Stevens during WW II. “We extinguished our lights on the ship, as did lighthouses on either side of the Columbia River. With lights on, we would have been an aid to the enemy. None of us wanted to meet the fate of the Diamond Shoal lightship, off Cape Hatteras, which was shelled in the WW I and sunk by a German submarine.”
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