To the Lighthouse

Today we had a perfect and beautiful cruise to Presque Isle Harbor. Presque Isle (French for peninsula) is a pretty wooded peninsula surrounded by turquoise blue water. It has two lighthouses about a mile from each other, both built in the 1800’s – the one built in 1840 is the ‘old’ lighthouse, and the one built in 1870 is the ‘new’ lighthouse. We had lunch at the only restaurant in town (the “town” consisted of said restaurant and a general store) then took a lovely afternoon walk to see both the lighthouses. The museum at the ‘new’ lighthouse (1870) had the original beacon light lens in the foyer. It was about four feet tall and 3 feet wide with multiple catadioptric prisms mounted around the periphery of the barrel. Although it looked like an art piece, Fresnel had invented a light that used less than half the energy (at that time, whale oil) of previous beacon lights. Each prism collected and intensified the light and the output was increased dramatically from the old reflector systems, with as much as eighty percent of the light transmitted over twenty miles out to sea from a single 1,000 watt bulb..

We later enjoyed a leisurely evening on the boat reading in the sun, then it was to dinner at the restaurant. The next morning was beautiful again, and we borrowed bikes from the general store and rode back to the lighthouses, stocked up on supplies at the general store, and headed out of the harbor to our next destination. (We have since learned that the Old Presque Isle Lighthouse is haunted. We didn’t notice, but it makes me wonder if that is why they built the ‘new’ lighthouse only 30 years after the original).