How Long, How Many, What got you started?

Seeing Shirin's "200 in 2 Years" thread got me wondering:

What got everyone started chasing lighthouses, how long have you been doing it and how many have you seen? We'll even count specks in the distance...I do!

I got started in June, 2000 with Cape Neddick, Maine on my way to Acadia National Park. I saw a picture of it at a farmer's market in Portsmouth, NH, and something just clicked in my brain, and I had to see it for myself. So we made a side trip, and I was officially hooked.

Including two lights I photographed before I was hooked (one 22 years ago!), my list stands at 51 from ME, NH, CT, NY, NJ, DE, MD, VA, NC, CA (22 years ago) and Nassau, Bahamas. I know, it may seem a paltry sum to some.....


[This message has been edited by Larry (edited 02-16-2002).]

As I stated in another forum I got started after a trip to Hilton Head Island in April 1999.

I climbed Harbor Town Light , but did not buy anything lighthouse then, except a shirt. i was surfing the net one night and happened upon a Collectibles Store site and saw the Harbour Lights version and was impressed enough to buy it. (Even if it was "only" a GLOW- of course I had no idea what that meant at the time)

I had actually visited 5 Lighthouses in Maine in September 1997- but as I tell my clients at AAA there's a rule that says if you visit Maine for more than opne day you have to visit at least 1 Lighthouse. I'm not quite sure what it was about Harbortown that caught my interest more than Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Marshall Point, Pemaquid Point and Owl's Head.

I've been to 158 since then, not counting repeat trips. I've been to all the landbased Lighthouses in NJ. We've gotten to many in NY, MA, RI, CA, GA, SC, DE, MD, FL, CT and a few in OR, VA and ME.

We hope to get to the Delaware Bay Lighthouses this Summer and to get back to the West Coast so we can finish up OR and CA and get to some in WA and British Columbia.

I also hope to finally get out to Long Island one of these days- we've been to a few, but not most of them.


Dennis

We lived in New Hampshire in '83 and visited Portland Head. Have had a picture of it over our desk all these years. We get up to Marblehead once a year, a long time ritual with us (4 hours each way) But- we didn't really get into this untill we stopped by Old Baldy on the way home from Myrtle Beach 3 years ago. It hit my wife and I the same time, now all our trips are lighthouse centered. We did a full blown full week July 2000 and saw 26 Michigan lights. Roughly we have seen 70 + including Ohio, Pa., N.C., S.C., Miss., Fla.,Cal.,Ind.,and the best lighthousing in the world, Michigan!

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Bud Schrader

My wife and I went on a cruse out of Fort Lauderdale Florida. We saw Key West lighthouse as we passed on the tour tram and I took a quik picture. Our next stop was to the Grand Camens where we found a spoontiques of it and Saint Marks, so we bought both. At the end of the cruse we arrived in Ft. Lauderdale at 9:00am and our hotel wasn't available until 4 m. So we decided to see what was in the area. We kept seeing signs Lighthouse street, lighthouse diner, etc..so we figured there must be a lighthouse near. We searched and found Hillsboro. The search was fun so I stopped at a gas station and bought a map and asked if there were any other lighthouses near by. The man said there was one just up the highway. 2 hours later we found and climbed Jupiter Inlet. What a great experience. There was a picture in the gift shop of the lighthouse from the draw bridge with a thunderstorm coming in and a lightning bolt hitting not to far away. I had to have it. It is still one of the best photos I have ever seen, though Gary's sun piller is just about as impressive. The next day we went over to the gulf coast and found Boca Grande, Gasperilla Rear Range light and Sanibel. On the way back we saw Cape Florida. We were hooked. to date we have seen 75. in California, Washington, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. We also saw one in Cozumel Mexico. I have pictures of all but one of the key lights in Florida. When I saw it I thought it was an oil drilling rig. I think it was alligator key. All of our vacations have to be to the coast now and if we don't see at least one lighthouse, it just wasn't a vacation.

Dale

Started in Summer of 1999 with Cape Henry and Old Point Comfort on a vacation to Virginia Beach. I had seen some lights in Oregon, Washington and Hawaii before I visited Cape Henry, but I wasn't into lighthouses back then.

Since I visited those two lights in 99, I've seen well over 100. I have essentially seen all the land based lights and most of the water based lights from Sandy Hook, NJ to Tybee Island, Ga. This summer I plan on adding 40-50 more to my list by visiting Michigan and maybe somewhere in the New England area.

It all started for me in May, 1990. We took a trip to The Outer Banks. I was more interested at the time in seeing Kitty Hawk and The Wright Brothers Museum. That changed quickly when we drove down the coast. My first lighthouse ever was Bodie Island and I was hooked. Having not been to the ocean many times before 1990, I knew nothing about lighthouses. That was about to change! We have now seen every light from Cape Henry to Cape Florida. Most by car and many by plane! I don't know how many we have seen over the years, but I was like a kid in the candy store the few days before the Providence reunion when we took a tour of Maine! We didn't get to see them all, hopefully we will get back there soon and be able to spend a few weeks instead of a few days!

Ahhhhhh living just 30 miles east of the South Haven lighthouse, which I seem to be photographing on a weekly basis of late, I've just got to second Bud's opinion!!!!

To be honest, I don't have a clue how many lighthouses that I've seen. I've hit all but a couple on the US Pacific Coast, one or two in Hawaii, probably about 50 here in Michigan, a number each in Ohio, PA, NY, Wisconsin, all of NC lights,and various lights in Florida, SC, VA, and Maryland. Obviously lacking are those in New England, which I'll remedy in part later this year. I've also seen a couple in Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Sweden. Not nearly any significant number of Finland's 58 (if I remember correctly) lights, most of which require a boat trip to see as they're scattered among the various islands in the Gulf of Bothnia. On the other hand, in Finland in the summer, you can visit them and photoghraph them about 20+ hours a day, which helps!

In terms of the number of frames I've run through my various cameras over the years, I'm well ahead of John's total number of posts on the HL forum! At present, there are in excess of 525 of these images that I liked enough at one time or another to digitize from my slides to put into my screensaver here at home. It's becoming the ultimate disk hog, currently occupying >600 Mbytes of hard drive space!

What really got me started on this lighthouse odyssey was a spring break camping trip while I was in grad school in 1973 to the Outer Banks. Bodie, Hatteras, and Okracoke are the guilty lights for getting me wound up and I've been aiming one camera or another at them for nearly 30 years. Going through a full blown gale with enough oomph to blow over travel trailers that spring at Bodie probably can be credited for getting me started in photographing them during gales and storms! The only thing left standing in the morning in the campground was the concrete block shower room where about 20 of us spent the night and had a great time!

Gary


[This message has been edited by lighthouse_photo (edited 02-17-2002).]