Hope Town

We're now on the island of Elbow Cay, tied up to a marina in a pretty little community called Hope Town. One of the attractions that draws tourists to Hope Town is the candy-striped lighthouse shown below. It's one of the very few lighthouses left in the world that still works the original way... using a kerosene lamp as the light source and using a rotating ring of lenses in order to make the light flash the correct pattern. (Each lighthouse is assigned a unique flash pattern. This lighthouse's pattern is to flash five times followed by a long pause, every fifteen seconds.) The rotating ring of lenses is driven by a hand-cranked system, kind of like a big clock. There's no electricity at all used at this lighthouse. It's very cool, if you're into that kind of stuff.

Here's a picture of the lighthouse that I took this morning while sitting on the back of our boat. I wanted to show you how picturesque our view is. It's just like a post card.

I'll also include a picture that I took yesterday when Judie and I climbed up to the top of the lighthouse. The picture below was taken looking back towards the boat so that you can see the harbor and the community. You'll notice that the marina is very small. It can only handle six boats. We had to radio ahead to reserve our slip.

While we were up at the top of the lighthouse I took a picture from inside the rotating ring of lenses. The lenses are a special design called Fresnel lenses, which won't mean much to non-physicists, but a physicist will look at them and say, "Cool", because they're different from a normal lens design.

There's a wick shown near the top of the photo which is where the kerosene burns like a big candle. It's so bright that with the help of the lenses it can be seen from seventeen miles out at sea.

Judie writes blog entries about the animals we encounter. I write about the technology. Between the two of us you get the complete story. If it were only one of us here, you'd only get half the story.