Gather 'round, kiddies, for the tale of my trip to a National Landmark, and the changes we made. Boston Light is the oldest lighthouse site in the country, but not the oldest structure. Those durned Brits done blowed it up during the revolution. Yeah, I’m looking at you, BooFae. 
I left NASA several years ago for a job as an engineering contractor to the US Coast Guard, trading a cush and prestigious job for one that paid me a LOT more money, doing the nuts and bolts engineering I luuuuuurve. One of my tasks was the development of a radio control link for the CG foghorn systems, using a pair of identical boxes to implement the control link. I did the digital hardware and wrote the software for the system.
Several of these systems have been installed already, and work well following the usual shakedown problems. Boston Harbor, however, is a special case. Instead of a single control and receive pair, Boston has one controller and 2 receivers. The controller at Boston Light, with one receiver at Graves Light, about 2 miles to the north, and the other on Minots Rock, roughly 4 miles further east. We tested the Boston configuration heavily all last summer, so I was confident that my software would work just fine; I was less confident that the actual installation would be flawless. I was right, as we will see as this story develops.
Boston Light is a half hour long boat ride from the Boston Coast Guard base. Monday dawned early, and the ride was smooth. The bosuns who took us out knew what the day was going to like, because the smuggled fishing rods and tackle onto the launches. The couldn’t leave us, and they were too small to do any law enforcement stuff.
We rode out at high tide, and arrived at a concrete dock that was about 8 up a very rickety and beaten-up ladder. I’m sure a lot of people have said ‘hell no!’ to that climb… Up we went, along with a lot of cases of tools, parts, and lunch bags. Like Cottonfield County, McDonald’s is a loooong way off.
There wasn’t a lot for me to do, since my piece of the action is contained in a steel box. I helped remove the old system and mounted the new on the wall, and pretty much spent the rest of the day picking my butt just like at many fire scenes. I managed to play tourist for a while, and these are some of the shots I took with my crappy cell phone camera.
Boston Light island, from the dock.
The old boathouse, just to the left of the previous shot.
The little white thing sticking out the window is a fog detector.
And there aremodern day foghorns.
The Keeper’s house as viewed from ground level at the lighthouse.
I managed to climb the lighthouse, which was no small feat. My legs were still screaming in pain Wednesday morning. There were 76 steps up a tight spiral stairway to a lower platform, then another 8 feet up a ladder to the lantern room. The lower platform was the access to the lens mechanism. In older days, instead of roller bearings, the lens floated in a pool of mercury.
The keeper’s house again, from the lantern room. The Boston skyline is visible in the distance.
This is the view of Graves Light to the north. You can’t see it in the picture, but Graves was easily visible by eye
This is looking east toward Minots. You could see it only when the conditions were severe clear.
This is looking down from the lower platform, trying to show the distance up and down inside the tower.
Back on the ground, the little spots in the middle of the picture are the launchesthat transported us to and from the island. Fishing is more fun than butt-pickin’…
These last two are from Wednesday. The day started badly overcast and chilly, then cleared and warmed up a lot. We came in at high tide, and had about 8 feet to climb on the ladder to get to the top of the dock. The tidal difference is about 9 feet, and this is what we had to deal with going home at low tide…
Final pic, almost worthy of a postcard.
The keepers have quite the reputation for pushing cookies on the visitors, and we were no exception. They were decent, but buy and bake the dough, and we collectively got tired of them. Well on the ride back Wednesday, we had yet another bag. The bosuns made some snide remarks as we left about more cookies.
About halfway through the ride, we overtook a bouy tender coming in also. A 19’ launch is faster and more maneuverable than a 41’ tender, so we pulled alongside about 50’ away, and the boat’s engineer took that bag of cookies and heaved it right into the lap of a crewman riding in front of the pilot. It was one hell of a throw, and left us laughing both at the feat, and the look of the crewman the cookies landed on. A couple of minutes later we heard over the radio, “Coast Guard 194567, thanks for the package.”
It was a cool trip overall, and I wanted to share.
I did not get to the pool and did not do any sort of exercise at all. sigh I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. I will get there this week.
