Local Lighthouses Beckon New Keepers of the Flame

For the past 65 years, the lighthouse on Anacapa Island has stood guard over Pacific mariners, beaming a charitable warning twice a minute for passing ships to steer clear of its knife-like cliffs.

Yet as high-tech devices such as global positioning systems and sophisticated radar nip at the value of these winking pillars, a budget-wary Coast Guard has begun to question whether it can maintain them in the face of deepening funding cuts.

Coast Guard officials are now studying money-saving options that could ultimately transfer ownership of 13 lighthouses across the state, including those on Anacapa Island and at Port Hueneme.

“In the face of cutbacks and streamlining . . . there is less money to maintain all the property we own,” said Anne Coneybeer, an environmental specialist for the Coast Guard. “We are trying to find ways to keep these functions but reduce our operating expenses.”

But don’t expect the local lighthouses to be torn down. The Coast Guard would keep up the lights and lease or transfer ownership to local officials, who could use them to draw tourists.

“In the short term we would find tenants to take over the property, maintain it, keep it up,” Coneybeer said.

“Then we would look for somebody to take it off our hands.”

In any event, the Coast Guard would continue to maintain the lights because both stations are currently used as navigational aids.

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Since the Coast Guard began automating its legion of lighthouses in the late 1960s, it has been unloading them to other agencies and private groups to transfer the weighty maintenance costs.

In the last 10 years, the Coast Guard has transferred or leased dozens of lighthouses in Alaska, Virginia, North Carolina, Washington and the Great Lakes region to be used as everything from homes to museums to cozy hotels.

“It’s always been a win-win situation for the Coast Guard and communities when it comes to lighthouses,” said Ann Grasso, a Coast Guard real estate specialist. “The Coast Guard saves its money and the community gets a lighthouse.”

Already, the National Park Service and the city of Port Hueneme have expressed interest in tapping the tourist potential.

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Channel Islands National Park Supt. Tim Setnicka hopes to establish an interpretive center at the site as well as open the lighthouse for public tours.

“It’s a major part of Anacapa Island and therefore a major piece of the park,” Setnicka said. “It should be open to the public, and we’d be more than happy to have it.”

Greg Brown, a Port Hueneme city planner, said the city is currently looking at the lighthouse there as a gateway to a large business and community park being planned along the waterfront.

“The long-range goal is to make this whole area a tourist attraction,” Brown said. “And the lighthouse would be an excellent entry to that.”

The waters off Ventura County and the Channel Islands have a treacherous history and a reputation for dashing ships and sailors against the rocky coast.

Shifting currents, swirling eddies and shallow shoals have all contributed to more than 100 shipwrecks and countless deaths in and around the islands and mainland shores.

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Anacapa--which comes from the Chumash word “eneepah,” meaning island of deception--was fittingly chosen to host the county’s first lighthouse after many ships met their end on the island’s incisor-like cliffs, most notably the 80-foot Winfield Scott in December 1853.

Bound for Panama with several hundred passengers including a number of successful gold prospectors, the Winfield Scott ran into a dense fog on its way from San Francisco.

After fumbling blindly through the seas, the side-wheeler ran aground off Anacapa Island and sank. Incidentally, it infested the island with wharf rats.

Although no one was killed in the accident, it illustrated the area’s danger and prompted demands that a lighthouse be built to safeguard the state’s burgeoning shipping industry from catastrophic loss.

A year later, painter James Whistler, then working for the U.S. Coast Survey, sketched Anacapa and concluded it was “inconceivable for a lighthouse to be constructed on this mass of volcanic rock--perpendicular on every face with an ascent inaccessible by any natural means.”

However, in 1912 the National Lighthouse Service erected the island’s first lighthouse--an acetylene lamp mounted on a skeletal tower atop a high bluff on east Anacapa Island.

In 1932, construction of the current lighthouse, which is now listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, was completed and manned by Coast Guard personnel until 1966, when the station was fully automated.

Two years ago the Coast Guard spent $350,000 to renovate and refurbish the 85-foot tower and adjoining quarters, with hopes of someday opening it for public tours.

By contrast, the concrete lighthouse at Port Hueneme is far less picturesque. But it wasn’t always that way.

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The original lighthouse, completed in 1874, rested at the end of a long, sandy point, where it cautioned ships of the coast’s unseen shallows and outcroppings of jagged rock.

The original lighthouse looked more like a Victorian mansion, with sun-splashed verandas, wide windows with decorated eaves and a wraparound deck. The actual light tower rose from the center of the two-story house and was equipped with a state-of-the-art, 1899 Fresnel lens.

In 1937 the lighthouse was decommissioned to make way for the construction of the harbor at Port Hueneme. A local yacht club bought the old lighthouse and moved it across the harbor, where it sat for years before being torn down.

“It was a great old place. Not much privacy, though,” said 76-year-old Laverne Dornberger of Vashon Island, Wash. Dornberger grew up in the lighthouse when her father was keeper in the 1930s.

“It seemed that even back then people loved lighthouses, so they’d come up and press their faces against the windows, which led to some rather embarrassing moments,” she said.

In 1941 a new concrete lighthouse was built on the Navy base and has been used ever since. As part of the base’s recent reorganization, the lighthouse property was transferred to the Oxnard Harbor District last year.

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Preservationists say they would be happy to see the sentinels turned over to communities, who pay more attention to their upkeep.

“The Coast Guard can’t possibly maintain these lighthouses. They’ve already got too much going on,” said Wayne Wheeler, president of the U.S. Lighthouse Society.

“But when you’ve got communities that are enthusiastic about their lighthouses, that’s where we can really make a difference.”