Face-Lift for a Relic by the Sea : Renovation Will Preserve 1932 Lighthouse at Entrance to Santa Barbara Channel

Once a week Wayne Truax packs his camera and a set of beautifully drawn 1932 blueprints and leaves Oakland, making his way by plane, car and Coast Guard cutter to this island 11 miles off the Ventura County coast.

As the Coast Guard’s West Coast facilities assessor, Truax is in charge of the $289,000 restoration of Anacapa Lighthouse that started last month.

If the seas aren’t too rough, he comes to check in with the contractors every Thursday.

But mostly he comes to see the lighthouse, to watch decades worth of lead paint and rust blasted from the 63-year-old building, to see bronze and brass emerge from hiding and to marvel at the treasure being restored.

“The people who designed these things knew what they were doing,” Truax said, giving a fond pat to the elegant curves of the cupola that shelters the light.

Perched on the eastern end of wind-swept Anacapa, where the pungent smell of brown pelican and sea gull droppings rivals the salt in the air, the lighthouse casts a beam visible for 26 miles.

It marks the entrance to the Santa Barbara shipping channel, winking indiscriminately twice a minute at tankers, cargo ships, fishing boats and pleasure cruisers passing by from dusk to dawn.

The National Park Service owns and maintains Anacapa Island, except for the lighthouse, which is still deeded to the Coast Guard. When the restoration is finished in March, the park service plans to open the building to public tours.

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The enticing fantasy of the lone lighthouse keeper living a remote existence on a faraway island is just that: Like all lighthouses on the West Coast, Anacapa Lighthouse has been unmanned for years. But the public’s love for lighthouses, fed by that fantasy and reflected in the thousands of calendars, postcards and other tourist trinkets sold every year, lingers on.

And even though the men and women of the Coast Guard now rely on the Loran system and satellites for navigation, they are just as softhearted as the public when it comes to lighthouses.

“People are very much attached to them,” said Ed Page, captain of the Coast Guard cutter Point Carrew, which took Truax out to Anacapa last week. “Problem is, we don’t need the structures anymore. The tough thing is that we are attached to them also, but we don’t have the budget to maintain them.”

Getting the federal money for this restoration was a sweet victory for the Coast Guard. Exposed to rain, wind and seawater, Anacapa Lighthouse was in great need of restoration, Truax said, in part because it hasn’t been manned since the late 1960s.

“When they were manned, the keepers touched things up all the time,” Truax said. “That’s what the lighthouse keepers did. When we automated these things, we took that away.

“The old lighthouse keepers were all paint daubers,” he added. “They’d be out every day painting. They loved them, they took care of them. You just can’t keep up with running rust with maintenance every three months.”

Riddled with asbestos and coated in at least 15 layers of lead-based paint, the lighthouse also poses environmental problems. During the restoration, it has been shrink-wrapped from base to tip in polyurethane to keep wind out and the hazardous materials in. For the next three months, it will look more like a piece of Christo art than an aid to navigation.

The first--and most difficult--part of the restoration is paint removal. Three men--a team of workers from Hollister-based Fernando Oliviera Construction--don protective white jumpsuits and respirators to venture inside, blasting paint off every surface.

The men live on the island from Monday to Thursday, camping out in tents and borrowing part of the National Park Service’s bunkhouse. At the end of the day, they eat, listen to the radio and go to sleep to the sound of the foghorn, said foreman Marcos Cuevas.

“It’s something different,” Cuevas said. “It’s a new experience.”

During the restoration, workers have to take special care not to disturb the brown pelicans, which are protected under the Endangered Species Act. Although the pelicans don’t nest or lay their eggs on the eastern end of Anacapa Island, National Park Service ranger Tree Gottshall said they usually fly over to spend part of the day roosting near the lighthouse.

“When they roost near the lighthouse, they are coming over to sit and relax, get away from the hustle and bustle at the other end of the island,” Gottshall said.

To protect the equipment, campers and day trippers to Anacapa are not allowed near the lighthouse, and the birds are smart enough to have noticed, he said.

The contractors said the birds don’t seem disturbed by their presence. They even sit on top of the secondary light--in use during the restoration--and the foghorn occasionally.

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Both the foghorn and the halogen light bulb inside the lighthouse have been powered with solar energy since 1989. The gleaming French lens that used to magnify the light was moved at the same time and now sits in a small museum building nearby. A much smaller modern lens--but with even more power--waits at the Coast Guard station at Channel Islands Harbor, to be put into the cupola when the restoration is complete.

As Truax leads a tour up the spiral staircase and through the lighthouse’s scaffolded interior, he explains the need for ventilation in the building.

“The whole lighthouse has to breathe, otherwise it will get wet and rot,” he said, pointing out brass vents in the sides of the cupola. Before the beacons were made to rotate automatically, lighthouse keepers used to pull down shades during the day to keep the intense magnifiers from starting fires with the reflected sunlight.

The windows in the cupola are curved and traced with diamond-shaped strips of brass, which will be cleaned and polished during the restoration. The brass is studded with handles that the keepers hung on to while they washed the windows from the outside. Truax points to tiny numbers etched into the brass work.

“You don’t just take these things apart,” he said. “They are like a puzzle. All of these pieces are numbered and they’ve got to go back exactly where they come from.”

He stopped to take a photograph of the blasters’ progress on the curved wall of the lighthouse.

“This was really ugly looking the other week,” Truax said, smoothing his hand over the surface with satisfaction lighting up his face.

“A lot of quality craftsmanship went into this building,” he added. “It’ll look real gorgeous when it’s done.”