This is the order they are -going from the mid port side. So far we have had

Hooper



Baltimore


Sandy Point



Sharp's Island



and Thomas Point


Next on the boat comes Cove Point, Point Lookout, Point No Point, and Point Lookout. In some of these the screen is close enough that you can see that the holes are still there.



We also saw the aft cabin port of Bloody Point Bar

Cove Point was a problem for me because when I did the picture, Cove Point was closed to the public.

The pictures were taken in 2000 from the boat and I was experimenting with digital for the first time. We went past Little Cove Point and anchored inside (south) of Cove Pt. close to shore. Discovered why no one anchors here. Very rolly - up to 20 deg roll (15 deg one way and 5 deg the other) from the wakes of passing barges and freighters. This is because the bay gets narrower right here. However it got quieter and we were well protected from the North wind.



In 2002, my husband attempted to take one of our grandsons to visit this lighthouse, but it was gated off and not accessible. All they could do was look through the fence.

And even now that it is part of the Solomon's musuem, I've never been able to visit it. The last time I tried, they didn't have enough volunteers at the museum to take a group, and the time before that the tours were all full. Also the tours do not run from October to May.

It is near the natural gas piers. This picture shows how near (and how far the natural gas piers are from Cove Point. The natural gas piers are supposed to be a restricted area, but until recently nobody much cared because the piers weren't being used. They were just built and abandoned. But in the last year or two, interest in using these piers was revived.



When I painted the screen, I tried to compress the area a little bit so as to show the gas piers in the side of the picture.


The semicircular area on the center right of this picture is the light coming through from the port on the other side of the boat



The area north of here is called Calvert Cliffs, and is a prime area for finding fossils, especially shark's teeth. It is also pretty common for pieces of the cliff to fall off into the bay, so it does pay to be careful.

The Calvert Cliff's Nuclear Power plant which is built around Calvert Cliffs serves to keep the taxes in Calvert County down,. It has a small educational exhibit.

The Solomon's Museum also has exhibits on Calvert Cliffs

and finding shark's teeth - this is a sand tray that is seeded with sharks teeth for the kids to find.

This is a MegaShark

Very nice and very informative. Cove Point was one of those we were able to see prior to the 2001 Harbour Lights Reunion.

The next lighthouse coming down the bay on the western side should be Drum Point.


Of course now, it is at the Maritime Museum in Solomon's island





When I painted it, I put it back in the Chesapeake. It is in the bow


When waves wash over the bow, this port gets more wear than the others, so I think this painting may have faded a little bit.



This is a photo from the exhibit under the lighthouse



I have visited the lighthouse with at least two of my children. This is my son's feet.

You do still have to remember to duck when going in through the hatch and if one is wide of girth, one may have trouble getting through the hatch.

Other pictures from visits to the lighthouse



Interior stairs


After the lighthouse was aquired by the museum in 1975, it was been furnish as it would have been in the early twentieth century.



This is a clock mechanism which can automatically ring the bell at specified intervals. Otherwise when it was foggy, someone would have to sit and ring the bell 24/7 or for as long as the fog lasted.





On selected weekends, The Keeper and his family will be "at home" in the Drum Point Lighthouse all weekend. You can learn what life was like here in Solomons in 1918, and what daily duties Keeper Yeatman performed to keep the lighthouse in tip-top shape.



This is two of my grandsons hanging out in front of the lighthouse

Nice pictures! And you only have ten posts to Wacko status!

Ah, Rosalie, you are bringing back some nice memories for many of us. John, our webmaster, put together some great bus trips prior to the HL Reunion in 2001. Many of us were able to visit lots of the lights you've shown us; we also saw the ones on the water when we went on the boat excursions during the reunion. I loved the side trips at this reunion and the 2005 Mackinac Island Reunion; I prefer to be able to go in and climb the towers. For me, it's a lot more rewarding to do that.

Brindfan, you and Rosalie will be Super Wackos before you know it! I've got to figure out a quick way to use the new graemlins. When John has time, maybe he will add them to the current list. Maybe if we kowtow to him:

Bowing won't get it, Grace. But I've posted a short-cut way to do them in the Forum about These Forums.

I've found some more pictures of Cove Point



And also a couple of Drum Point

The next point where there was a lighthouse was Cedar Point which is right off the Officer's Club of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. But the problem with this lighthouse is that by 1999, the only thing left was a stick in the water.



I found a picture of the lighthouse as it was disintegrating


And the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum had a model of it


And they had the cupola on display



There was also a drawing in the local paper, which is what I mostly used to decide what it used to look like

Gosh, doesn't that just make you sick?! Such a shame that such wonderful structures should be abandoned to the elements.

It certainly does. Particularly since I think if I had known about it, I could have gotten a picture of it maybe - we moved to the county in 1973, and the picture of the stick was taken 36 years later in 1999. Surely if I had gone out in 1974, there would have been more to it.

The next lighthouse south - Point No Point is a favorite of mine because of the name.. I don't know whether it means that there is no point to being here, or if it is because there isn't much of a point of land, more of a bulge.

In the summer of 2000, I wrote:

The Navy was using the target off Pt No Pt (or as a British gent who called the CG called it "Your No Point Point, or Point Pointless or whatever it is"). He wanted to know if his course was OK (with regard to the live targets), but since he was talking to the Balto. CG, they didn't have a clue.



As we passed Point No Point, the wind picked up and we were 'racing' another sailboat. He had a big headsail (unlike our little Yankee jib) and was really heeled over. I tried to see how far we were heeled by looking over the side to see how much of the bottom paint showed, but couldn't do it - Bob said I would fall in.




As we approached the targets, we called the range boat, and asked if we were OK, and we were. The other boat dropped behind us after the radio exchange Saw a couple of helicopters there - usually we see jets. There are different amounts of distance one has to keep from the range depending on whether it is being used by jets, heliocopters or gun boats.


Thro binoculars, saw them put 3 men on the Point No Point lighthouse from a little boat maybe 20 feet long. The men looked like dollhouse figures on an out of scale boat - they looked much too big for the boat. They were about 1/2 to 1/3rd as tall as the boat was long. There were four on the bow, and one would leapt for the ladder and then a second one and you could see them attain the platform level, and then after another approach, a third one was on the ladder. The 4th one didn't go. Too far away for pictures unfortunately.







This was about the fifth picture that I painted of lighthouses, and I was very proud of it. It was painted from a picture I took with a commerical fishing guide's boat anchored nearby and the birds were flying around hoping for a handout.


This picture was taken at the Mariner's Museum in Newport News.

There's only one more of the oval ports left to show, and this porthole is up over the top of a closet in the main saloon. It didn't initially have a screen for it, so my husband made one.

First he traced out the outline of the port, and then he got a fan belt and cut it to size



The lighthouse that I decided to put on this one was Fort Carroll which is on an island in the Patapsco near the Key Bridge



The fort is deterioriating because of the birds, and the birds are apparently the reason why it can't be disturbed or fixed up




I wanted to put both the bridge and the fort in there.



The screen isn't completely flat because the fan belt doesn't hold it stiff so it doesn't look as good as the other pictures (in my opinion).

The only screens left to show are the other three aft ports which have Old Point Comfort, Seven Foot Knoll and Smith Point. When my mother had her 91st birthday, we took her down to the inner harbor and took a water taxi around. I got pictures of Seven Foot Knoll at that time. I have not actually visited it.



Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse is a beautiful red screw pile lighthouse which was at the end of Bodkin Creek, near the Patapsco River. It was the second one built on the Chesapeake. It is the oldest surviving one in Maryland The house is unusual in that in addition to being red, it is round.

My husband's (and now my BIL's) home was on Bodkin Creek and they remember this lighthouse when it was active when the waves from wakes and wind would sometimes be 7 to 15 feet or more tall. The shoal is still there, but it is now marked only by a simple post .



It was moved to the inner harbor of Baltimore in 1989 and is now a tourist attraction in Baltimore.



My husband spend his teen years helping his dad build a house on Bodkin Creek, so he well remembers when this lighthouse was an active ATON and he was resentful when they took it away.

According to accounts, waves would build up around this shallow area and become great walls of water.



So when I painted it, I put the lighthouse back where it was in the Bay when my husband was growing up.

I have a lot of pictures of both Smith Point and Old Point Comfort. This is Old Point Comfort from the boat





These are from the shore.


Since the aft cabin ports have a strong horizontal component, I used the photos taken from the boat in October.

I'm guessing that the last two photos showing the keeper's dwelling must have been after Isabel hit and flooded the yard up to the base of the LR window, destroying the foundation plantings.

Hey, Rosalie, your next post is #50!

So this is Old Point Comfort. I was quite happy with how it turned out.



Last is Smith Point

Smith Point is the southern shore of the Potomac River. It is often very rough in this area when the waves coming down the Potomac meet the ones coming up the bay. It is wise to pick your weather carefully if you have to round this point or it may be quite rough. At the time this photo was taken, it was quite calm and windless - glassy calm



The lighthouse itself is too tall to fit comfortably within the space unless it is reduced in size. So I used a photo I took where there was another sailboat ahead of us going south.

This is a not very good picture of the Smith Point Screen which I am less happy about because my photos are much better (in my opinion) than my painting. And the photo isn't as good as the screen. It is harder to get pictures of the aft cabin screens. I can walk around on the deck to get pictures of the ones in the main saloon, but for the aft cabin ones, I have to be on a dock on that side of the boat.

At the time I painted the lighthouse screens, I had not seen, or not close enough to get good pictures of, a lot of other lights (New Point Comfort, Wolf Trap, Piney Point, Hooper Strait (which I still have not been to because I refuse to go by boat on a summer weekend), Solomon's Lump,



or Old or New Cape Henry), and I had a picture but didn't think that Lazarette Light was important enough to picture.



Lazarette is located on the Patapsco east of Baltimore City on the end of the pier of the Lehigh Cement Corporation. It is often almost obscured by ships being loaded. I could only see it coming east on the Patapsco. This apparently was a perennial problem because by 1883 the area around the depot had been extensively developed with many large buildings leading to complaints that the light was too short to be seen coming up the river to the harbor.



It is a replica of the original light.

Congratulations on becoming a Wacko, Rosalie! Now you can post your avatar.

It's interesting that you brought up Fort Carroll; I thought about it when you posted the pictures of Cedar Point. It was so sad to see it in such a deteriorated state back in 2001. One that seems to have been very beautiful was Bodkin Point; it was discontinued when Seven Foot Knoll went up. Apparently it was totally gone by 1914.

... only just had time to look at hte screens. Aren't they brilliant!
Do you do commissions? I bet there would be a market for these things! They are great fun and would look great on any window!

Yea!!

Anyway the pictures were taken at two different times - some in the fall of 2000 and the others in the spring of 2005, so yes they were after Isabel.

Thank you very much. Up to the present I have not done commissions. The actual process is quite easy (I explained it in the first lighthouse screen painting thread). But there are two reasons I don't do commissions or work for someone else.

One is that the screens are like my children - when I get finished with one I wouldn't like to give it up to anyone else.

And the second is that I don't want to be responsible to someone else who might be disappointed or upset that I hadn't done the work to their satisfaction. I'm retired - there's no point in putting myself at someone else's discretion as far as deadlines etc. I have no idea what I would charge for it either.

A possible third reason is - in order to function as they were intended, the screen should be a real screeen in a real window (My Opinion). Otherwise there's no point.

So I wouldn't do purely decorative screens - anyone could do a painting of a lighthouse. There is no reason to do it on a screen unless you want an actual screen decorated. Don't know if I'm being very clear here.

Anyway the boat screens are quite small compared to house screens. A boat screen will take me only a couple of days to do. A house screen is so much bigger that it will take a week or more, and I just don't want to do that.

You've probably all seen a bus, van or car wrapped with a graphic. Sometimes the windows are also covered using a finely perforated printable material.

Here\'s an example .

Using your idea of printing lighthouse images on this material and affixing it to your boat windows/portholes could also provide privacy. Of course you'd need an exact outline of the glass area.

The images could be photographs, paintings, etc.

They shouldn't be too expensive each if you did a bunch at one time.

Although there are a lot of good ideas for your doing this on a commercial basis, I can understand your feelings. Retirement is all about YOU - finally! You don't want to have to meet deadlines and try to please customers, etc. I think it's terrific that you have such wonderful hobbies to keep you busy and happy.

I don't think my somewhat primitive paintings are suitable for graphics on a vehicle. :p I shudder to think what they would look like blown up to window size.

It isn't the fact that the material would be perforated that would be a primary objective anyway. These are paintings that were done on a window/porthole screen. Unless it functions as a screen, it doesn't work at least not for me.

However if any one wants to use my images to put somewhere, just ask.

I can totally understand the reasons behind not taking commissions... I don't like the obligations and the time pressure either.
But the screens are just lovely! Gave me some ideas.
Love the "signature" by the way! (must get a pic of my new grandson )

I think the building in the right corner of your first Seven Foot Knoll picture is the Marriott Hotel that we all stayed in for the Baltimore Reunion.

Jim, it looks to me like Rosalie had to take the picture from the side where the hotel is - we faced the marina and could see the lighthouse across the water. No?

I took the pictures from the water taxi. So I wasn't on a side, I was in the middle. The Marriott in Baltimore that is on the water is the one on Aliceanna St. and the view from there appears to be down toward the end of the harbor toward the Inner Harbor Marina. The lighthouse would be on the same side as the hotel.

This is a picture from the hotel room which was posted on Trip Advisor.


However I don't think that the hotel is in my picture as it looks like it is taller than the building shown




Although in this picture you can see the short smokestack and dome that are in the third picture.