Photos courtesy of the Columbia River Maritime Museum.
At 2:02 in the afternoon of April 9, 1951, Lightship Columbia WLV-604 dropped her anchor 5.1 miles off the entrance to the Columbia River “maintaining all characteristics of station.” For the next 29 years, until retirement, this would be Columbia’s only station.
Columbia represents the fourth and final generation of lightships designed and made for the United States Coast Guard. Only six of these newly designed ships were built. Of these six, only two remain, and the Columbia River Maritime Museum is the proud caretaker of the best preserved and unaltered representative of these last American lightships. The new lightships were built to be strong and seaworthy, in order to endure any storm that came their way. With transverse watertight bulkheads, an all welded steel hull, and 7,000-pound mushroom anchor, these lightships were the toughest and most reliable ever built. In addition, this new class of lightships was also the most livable of the lightships in service, with warm, dry and relatively spacious quarters, and by all accounts, excellent food.
Built at the Rice Brothers Shipyard in East Boothbay, Maine, Lightship Columbia’s keel was laid in 1949. Columbia was launched on April 18, 1950, commissioned on December 19, 1950, delivered to Seattle in March of 1951, and then made her way to her new station by April 1951. Columbia was officially launched as WAL-604, and was later reassigned WLV-604 by the Coast Guard in 1965 when all lightships assumed the new WLV designation.
Until 1967, Columbia had a 16-man crew. All worked 42-day shifts with 21 days off, in a constant rotation, so at any one time two-thirds of the crew was always on duty. After 1967, this changed to 28 days on board with 14 days off in the same rotation pattern. One of the first to serve on Columbia, and on board for the commissioning and delivery to Seattle, was then 18-year-old Joseph McCarthy. Seaman McCarthy served on Columbia until November 1953. McCarthy would return again to Columbia for active duty in 1966, this time as the new Commanding Officer. During a recent interview with museum staff, Mr. McCarthy relived some of his memories of his experiences on Lightship Columbia. Excerpts of this interview are featured below.
Mr. McCarthy was born and raised in Massachusetts. He joined the Coast Guard in 1949 at the age of 17. After his tenure on the Columbia, he went on to serve in Coos Bay, Tongue Point, and Chicago. He hated his desk job in Chicago and said, “I figured the only way out was to put in for lightship duty. That’s how I got accepted as captain of Columbia.” McCarthy served a total of 24 years in the Coast Guard, retiring in 1974. He went on to dispatch tugs, and then spent 11 years as a dispatcher for the San Francisco Bay Bar Pilots before retiring at age 59.
“I enjoyed it,” McCarthy said of his time on board the Columbia as a seaman in the 1950s. “It was before TV and there were no movies. All we had were books.” The men played pinochle all weekend long, around the clock, from Friday night through Sunday night. “In all my time, no one played poker for money. They played a lot of cribbage, but mostly pinochle.” The men did a lot of fishing also. By the time McCarthy returned to Columbia as the new commanding officer in 1966, the crew had both TV and movies.
Every third Tuesday of each month, one of the buoy tenders from Tongue Point supplied the Columbia. The buoy tender would tie up to the stern of the Lightship and throw out a hawser, followed by a 2-½ inch fire hose to supply her with fresh water. Additionally, the buoy tenders brought other supplies, food and mail. They also carried the men who were coming on duty and took off those going ashore. In the 1950s Tillamook Rock Lighthouse was still in commission. The buoy tenders would begin their mission by supplying Tillamook Rock. From there they went to Columbia and then back to Astoria.
The crew of the Lightship had “a gentleman’s agreement” with the Columbia River Bar Pilots. Every week, sometimes twice a week, the crew on the Lightship would throw a watertight container out and the pilot boat crew would put a newspaper and any mail into it. Crew members could not count on getting all their mail this way, though. The only assured mail delivery was via the buoy tender, which would arrive midway through their 42-day tenure.
“The food was good,” McCarthy said. As captain he was also the commissary officer, so he bought all the food. He got in trouble with the District Office in Seattle because he operated at a deficit ten months out of twelve. But he never went more than ten percent over his limit, so he never had to submit a report. “I spent every penny they gave me and a little more. If it was one thing you wanted out there, it was to be fed well.”
On a typical day, the crew worked four hours on, followed by eight or twelve hours off. Two men stood watch at any given time, one in the wheelhouse and one below with the generator. The crewman in the wheelhouse sent weather reports to Westport, Washington. These reports were then forwarded to the Weather Bureau. He was also responsible for checking the radio beacon, as well as checking on visibility and turning on the foghorn when visibility dropped below five miles.
The diaphone foghorn gave a two-second blast every twenty seconds that could be heard over five miles away. Since the foghorn was located directly behind the wheelhouse, it was very loud. Crewmen did not wear earplugs because “that was before the time that they worried about your health.” Also, they had to be able to hear the radio. Down on deck the foghorn was so loud it “vibrated your teeth.” Sleeping through the foghorn was not bad. “We got so engrossed in playing pinochle and learning to talk between the horn blasts, that pretty soon we didn’t hear the foghorns, especially when the fog continued for ten or twelve days.”
Even worse than the foghorn, according to McCarthy, was the sound of the air compressors filling up the tanks that operated the foghorn. Those tanks and compressors were in the machine shop located right below the berth deck where the crew slept.
McCarthy said his time on the Columbia was good, "but a lot of guys didn't like it." A few of the crew members were seasick most of the time. The worst time to be out was at the end of December through early February, when winds from the southwest blowing 40 to 50 knots were common and severe storms brought 80 to 90 knot winds. "She was a good riding ship even though she was only 128 feet long," McCarthy said. "Don't get me wrong, though, it was rough." With high seas, the ship would stretch the anchor chain so far that when a wave caught the ship, there would be a "good jolt." Most of the time the ship headed into the wind and pitched with very little roll. Once in a while, though, she would lie in a trough, where the governing factor was the current and not the wind, and then she would roll.
When asked about his most memorable experience, McCarthy said life on board was generally pretty boring, but he recalled one time when he was captain that a ship got within 25 feet of the Lightship. He called all hands on deck with lifejackets on. The ship steamed right down the side of Columbia. She was so close that the sound of the foghorn bounced back in just seconds.
When Joseph McCarthy left the ship for the last time in 1967, he had spent a total of four and a half years on board Columbia. Some years later Mr. McCarthy commissioned a painting of Columbia that "shows a good rough sea." The picture hangs on his living room wall.
This story appeared in the
September 2001 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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