Cape Blanco August 2012

Grant at the beginning of the tour talking about life at the Lighthouse in 1870.

Almost a month without a blog entry! I guess there just hasn’t been a whole lot going on.

The BIG NEWS is our refrigerator got fixed!! We were without a refrigerator for 3 weeks waiting for the part to arrive and then scheduling when we could get back to Coos Bay to have it installed. Our trailer isn’t even 2 1/2 years old and so far our Norcold refrigerator has been recalled twice and had two cooling units replaced. This isn’t a good trend! Also good news we haven’t had any mice in the trailer for over a month. Let’s hope that is a trend.

I wrote last month “Our weather cycle is pretty much: clear & windy, foggy & windy, foggy & not windy and REALLY WINDY!”. In August it has been foggy & windy more than anything. We went 11 straight days with the fog so thick we couldn’t even see the ocean from the lighthouse and some days we couldn’t even see the parking lot. Notice how bundled up we are in the picture at the top of this post? I was also wearing a down vest under my jacket. That day the wind was 35 mph with gusts to 43 mph!

A sunny but very windy day.

A very typical foggy day.

Yes, there is a lighthouse out there somewhere.

Although, it has been very windy all along the coast, the fog is mostly just out here. Visitors tell us all the time that the fog didn’t start until they were 2 or 3 miles off the main highway. August is the peak visitor month here. Regardless of how windy and foggy it is, we have been getting 200 or more visitors a day. While the rest of the country has been having heat waves, we seldom make it to 60 degrees and we get a lot of people that have come to the Oregon Coast to cool off.

Probably our most interesting visitor this month was an 82 year old woman that came out for her annual visit. Her father was a Lighthouse Keeper here both before and after the Coast Guard took over the lighthouse in 1939. She said that she lived out here for 12 years. Unfortunately, she was here on one of our busiest days so we didn’t get very much time to talk with her.

However, Kathy did get a chance to ask her, “how did you deal with the insane wind?”

She lit up, “oh my, I have a vivid memory of my father crawling on his belly from the house to the lighthouse one extremely windy day!” Their house was right across from the lighthouse  about 100 feet! We know that when the wind hits 57 mph you can’t stand up straight, you have to bend forward at the waist or you will be blown backwards! How fast was the wind blowing that the Lighthouse Keeper had to crawl to work?!