Lighthouse seeker

July 2024

By Craig Moodie

It’s there in the middle of Buzzards Bay waiting for us every time we sail. Cleveland Ledge Lighthouse. It stands about three miles from our mooring in Megansett Harbor off North Falmouth, Massachusetts. We’ve sailed our 12-foot catboat, Finn, in those waters for almost two decades. Wouldn’t you think we would have run circles around the lighthouse by now?

The truth is, no matter how often I see it out there beckoning, no matter how many times I’ve set a course for it, I’ve yet to circumnavigate it. Seek it as I may, it eludes me. Some days, a trick of the light foreshortens the distance to it, magnifying it so you swear you could sail out to it in nothing flat. Other times, the optics transform it into a pinprick on the horizon – appearing so far away that reaching it would be an epic voyage for our yachtlet. I’ve seen it hover above the water surface as if levitating. A mirage, no doubt. But it makes you wonder for a moment if it moves under its own power.

As the years wear on, I’ve come to think about it the way Mallory did Everest. I ache to sail around it “because it’s there” – jutting from the water far offshore, both inviting and spooky, a promise and provocation, goal and goad. Thinking about the circumnavigation makes me feel a mixture of unease and longing akin to a fever – lighthouse fever. It spikes every sailing season.

Lighthouses and their smaller brethren, buoys, have long beguiled me: They seem like castaways, exiled to desolate places to stand as solo sentinels, enduring conditions I can only imagine. I cut my sailing teeth in the Chesapeake Bay, and many times in Carousel, our family’s Ohlson 35 yawl, we encountered Sandy Point Ledge Light, a sort of sistership to Cleveland Ledge Light. It rose straight out of the water near the mouth of the Magothy River and the approaches to Gibson Island. To my 10-year-old deckboy’s eyes, it looked like some semi-submerged castle turret, a vestige of a drowned kingdom, the last defense against the Bay Bridge sea dragon. The bridge soared so lofty and so immense as we passed under it toward the lighthouse that I felt a kind of reverse vertigo hearing the hum of the puny vehicles thread the cat-walk-like lanes far overhead – a precariousness now even more gut-churning in the wake of the Key Bridge disaster.

I was around the same age on a family cruise to New England waters when we sailed past the Texas Tower at the entrance to Buzzards Bay off Cuttyhunk. Eyeing the structure as we approached, I felt a delicious wave of the willies wash over me. It looked impossibly tall and otherworldly, its four skeletal legs ready to take long strides through the chop so it could capture us and carry us to its home planet. We passed close enough so its spidery shadow slithered over us. I riveted my eyes on it as it disappeared into the haze astern.

Sankaty Head Light on Nantucket, along with Nauset and Truro Lights on the Cape, stand as one of my holy trinity of lighthouses. I revere Sankaty especially. Once during my years as a commercial fisherman, it presided over a day of striped-bass fishing I’ll never duplicate: Aboard Sea Hunter, a 35-foot Maine-built workboat, my skipper and I caught 34 keepers (and a whopper of a paycheck) – this in golden sunshine and light airs on a November day that belied the forecast of storm warnings. It stood above us like a benevolent red and white giant blinking in amazement at our feat.

The Great Round Shoal buoy, 55 miles out in Nantucket Shoals, haunts me still – though I haven’t passed it in 40 years. In Sea Hunter, we would shove off at midnight for the five-hour steam to jig for codfish in the Great South Channel. In a hard tide, the boat heeled, churning out a wake as if it steamed at full throttle. In rough seas, it pistoned like some ride on a merry-go-round gone haywire.

The buoy was the demarcation point that triggered a trickle of fear as we approached it on our way out, and a surge of elation on our way home. Heading out, its light and whistle – if you could see the light through the blindfold of fog – signaled our passage into offshore waters, the shipping lanes, hard labor, and the unknown. We always passed it in the dark heading out and gave it a wide berth to avoid hitting it as so many other vessels had. On the steam home in daylight, we saw the dings and dents and paint smears from those vessels that failed to account for the magnetic effect buoys exert on boats. But mostly the sight of it on our homeward steam overjoyed us: It told us payday, cold beers, and girlfriends were ever closer.

But these days Cleveland Ledge Light looms largest in my mind. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve attempted a solo circumnavigation of it. More than once I’ve sailed off in benign conditions only to find the seas in the open water too sporty for the likes of Finn. The cover art of a novel called “Moominpappa at Sea,” which depicts the eponymous patriarch laboring at the oars of a dinghy rising on a mountainous roller behind which rises an ominous obelisk-like lighthouse, gives you an idea of how I’ve felt out there at times. (The book might be for young readers but the descriptions of sailing off to a remote island would gladden the heart of any mariner young or old.)

The prevailing summertime breeze in Buzzards Bay is sou’west – dead on our nose from our mooring – and the lighthouse lies in the eye of the wind. From the outset, our odds of gaining the cooperation of Aeolus are slim.

But only a few seasons ago, my wife Ellen and I almost succeeded. I decided I could outfox the wind by taking an unusually long tack through the shipping channel across the bay to Marion and then setting a course for the lighthouse. If only the wind hadn’t lightened so much – in the center of the channel. The wind dropped. The sail drooped. The sun hammered down on the slick swells. I had to paddle – on constant alert for the approach of vessels. Not until we crawled back to Seal Rocks, well out of harm’s way, did I pause to wipe the sweat dripping off my nose and to squint at the tug towing a barge in full ballast as it drummed through the water where we’d been.

I dared a look at Ellen.

She lifted an eyebrow.

“Let’s not do that again.”

Maybe she was right. Sticking to the confines of Megansett Harbor and Squeteague Harbor might be wiser in our little craft.

I remain at heart a lighthouse seeker. Still, I worry: In the late ’60s, my dad became smitten with the idea of cruising for a year aboard Carousel with my mom, two older sisters, and me, but for various reasons let the dream die. Will I round the bend before the lighthouse?

But as long as it’s there, I’ll have the urge to conquer it.

If you happen to be out by Cleveland Ledge Lighthouse some fair day, and you pass a graybeard standing in the cockpit of his little catboat with his arms upraised in exultation, that might just be me, rounding the lighthouse and heading for home.

Craig Moodie lives with his wife Ellen in Massachusetts. His work includes “A Sailor’s Valentine and Other Stories,” and, under the name John Macfarlane, the middle-grade novel “Stormstruck!”, a Kirkus Best Book.

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