The buoys and beacons have been restored to a state of efficiency, but the lightship is still on shore.
The Piper Island lightship will be the next vessel to be relieved.
My predecessor suggested that a lightship should be placed near the Fairway Buoy to mark the entrance to the dredged cutting, and as a guide for vessels visiting the port, as well as to exhibit the necessary tidal signals.
The new relievinglightship built at Townsville was finished last April.
The Claremont Island lightship had a thorough overhaul two years ago.
The lightshipparted her cable, and was carried about 900 feet above ordinary high-water mark on the Bynoe beach, and two of the Department's boats were smashed.
The Timandra Bank lightship requires some repairs, and the decks want caulking, which I anticipate may be done without removing the vessel from her station.
A new vessel has replaced the old lightship at the Upper Flats.
Afterwards a noise was heard upon the window-panes, as of fine sand thrown; and, lifting the blind, Pierston saw that the distant lightship winked with a bleared and indistinct eye.
There was a chilly wind blowing outside, and the lightship on the quicksand afar looked harassed and forlorn.
They looked out upon the sea, and the lightship shining as if it had quite forgotten all about the fugitives.
The lightship winked every night from the quicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through its eye-glass on the ship.
I could see a bough of tamarisk wave outside at that time, and, beyond the bough, the same abrupt grassy waste towards the sea, and at night the same oldlightship blinking far out there.
Its rays were repeated from the far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysterious Shambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into due position as balanced opposites.
He informed her that they were picked up by the lightship men, and afterwards, at their request, taken across to the opposite shore, where they landed, proceeding thence on foot to the nearest railway station and entering the train for London.
The lightship had loomed quite large by this time, and a few minutes after they had burnt the handkerchiefs and umbrella a coloured flame replied to them from the vessel.
With bad weather we'll not pick up the Nantucket Lightshipbefore Thursday night.
But the Nantucket Lightship was a reference I understood.
The lightship only carried an ordinary riding light, like any other vessel, so that it was almost impossible, unless you knew the port very well, to go in closer to the land at night.
Once we very nearly ran aground, but discovered just in time that the vessel we were steering for with confidence was only a wreck, on a dangerous shoal, and that the lightship itself was further ahead.
So that when we were told that Nantucket Lightship had been sighted on Thursday morning from the bridge, a great sigh of relief went round to think New York and land would be reached before next morning.
So accurate is this in practice that a trained operator can steer his ship in the densest fog directly to a lightship or any other point where a submarine bell is sending its warning beneath the sea.
All the inmates of the lightship came on board the yacht, with which they were much delighted.
The 'Albatross' was the little steamer we saw lying alongside the lightship at Piper Island, on the 19th inst.
In the meantime Mr. Watson called at the lightship and recognised his own dinghy, which had drifted thither a few days before.
Perhaps we might make the Far Lightship five and twenty miles away.
The neighbourhood of this lightship naturally became a very favourite hunting ground of the new flying boats, which used to bomb the Huns whenever one of their submarines was sighted either on or below the surface.
It is only fifty from the Dutch lightship on the North Hinder Bank, where German submarines used to come up so as to make sure of their course on their way between the English Channel and their own ports.
The Shambles Lightship was rounded by the 'Guinevere' at 11.
The course was to be from Cowes round the Shambles Lightship off Portland, and thence round the south side of the Isle of Wight and the Nab Lightship, back to Cowes, about 120 miles.
About noon, however, a breeze sprang up, and the Seven Stones Lightship was passed close to about 3 o'clock on Tuesday morning.
Her competitor being placed hors de combat, 'Egeria' was immediately put under snug canvas, and sailed easily until she rounded the Shambles Lightship at 4 o'clock.
The Emperor Napoleon, desirous of encouraging aquatic sports, gave two prizes to be sailed for by yachts of all nations from Cherbourg round the Nab Lightship and back, a distance of 130 miles.
Going up to it and peering outward, he could distinguish the dark level of the sea, and presently the ruby gleam of the Alderwick lightship appeared, grew brighter, and faded against the dim horizon.
Mark realised that, if from here he could see that ruby gleam, it was certain that the crew of the lightship could equally well see the flash of his electric torch.
The Bonadventure had been, under these innumerable lights, making quiet way down an avenue of buoys twinkling in their degree, and came into view of the lightship beyond them.
Soon we picked up the flash of a lightship off the Dutch shore, and soon after that the cold to which my wanderings had not made me careless sent me inside.
Marks: Western Light of Cape Elizabeth on eastern part of woods on Cape until the lightship bears NE.
This lies inside the lightship at Boston, extending from this to and well into Nahant Bay.
I presume, Tom," Jack went on to say, "you came down when you did partly to catch that sound as we came near the shoals where the lightship stands guard day and night the whole year through.
Just as soon as we get over the lightship I will know how to steer, Jack.
The waters from the Tilbury docks to the Nore lightshipare of great strategic importance, hence there is here a station for destroyers, torpedo-boats, and gun-boats.
Then the Gull lightship also fired guns and rockets.
Noting her rapid approach to the Goodwins, on which an awful sea was running, and the helpless and dishevelled condition of the vessel, the Gull lightship fired guns and rockets at intervals of five minutes.
There was no lightship on or near the Goodwin Sands till 1795, when one was placed on the North Sand Head.
Now it was the Regensburg calling to say, "I am lying off Outer Jade Lightship and illuminating it with my searchlight.
The observers in the lightship winked at one another, for they had talked with the officer of the Admiralty tug and were wise to the game.
Three days passed, and then at high tide the U boat came cheerfully along upon its mission and lay off the lightship exactly as before.
The incident was reported at once to the naval authorities and the lightship men were instructed to report again at once if the submarine’s performance was repeated.
When Caleb gave up the lightship Captain Joe had established him with Betty's mother as boarder, and that was how the marriage came about.
The first were the three fixed lights of the lightship that marked the North sandhead; the latter was the fixed light that guarded the South sandhead.
It must not be supposed, from what has been said, that the Gull Lightship was the only vessel of the kind that existed at that time.
Next morning the look-out on board the Gull lightship reported the Trinity steam-tender in sight, off the mouth of Ramsgate harbour, and the ensign was at once hoisted as an intimation that she had been observed.
We did not sight the lightship Demerara until next day at noon, although we were going at fully five knots an hour.
Suddenly we were all startled by the report of a gun, and out of the fog on the starboard bow loomed the figure of a lightship with three ball-crowned masts.
As we passed the lightshipshe fired another gun, and a lift in the fog showed the name on her side--Coningbeg.
Life on the South Shoal lightship is at all times a hard and trying one, and, as a matter of fact, the crew are instructed not to expose themselves to danger outside their special line of duty.
The life of a lightship crew, as will be told in another place, is a laborious and often a dangerous one.
Meanwhile the rescuers made for the Prince's lightship and were told that a vessel in distress was signalling on the higher part of the Girdler Sands.
During the greater part of my two weeks' sojourn in that lightship the weather was reasonably fine, but one evening it came on to blow hard, and became what Jack styles "dirty.
Two of these sentinels, the Tongue lightshipand the Prince's lightship, in the vicinity of the Girdler Sands, saw the signals of distress.
On a terrible night in the year 1857 a Portuguese brig struck on the Goodwin Sands, not far from the lightship that marks the northern extremity of those fatal shoals.
About midnight the Tongue lightship was reached and hailed.
This lightship was maintained by the Netherlands Government and stood at the mouth of the River Scheldt, forty-five miles northwest of Flushing.
Thus the Dutch steamship Katwyk, which lay at anchor seven miles west of the North Hinder Lightship off the Dutch coast, was sunk.
They managed to reach the lightship in their lifeboats just as their vessel sank.
