Notas del episodio
Lightships were vessels built never to sail, anchored as floating lighthouses over sandbanks and shoals where no tower could stand. The first modern one was placed in 1734 by Robert Hamblin off the Nore sandbank at the mouth of the Thames, run as a private venture with partner David Avery that charged passing merchants for the light. They added stations off Norfolk in 1736, the Owers in 1788, and the Goodwin Sands in 1793 before Trinity House took over the job. Early wooden ships with fluke anchors dragged in storms, until the converted fishing boat Pharos in Scotland carried a mushroom anchor in 1807. Iron chains followed in the 1820s, laid out at six feet of chain per foot of depth so the slack acted as a shock absorber.
Builders gave the hulls rounder, heavier shapes and packed salt between inner and outer planking to kill rot, which helped US Lightship 16 at the Sandy Hook and Ambrose stations last more than 80 years. Most had no propulsion until 1891, when Great Lakes lightships got steam engines to flee winter ice. Hulls were usually red with the station name in white, though the Huron lightship was black and Minots Ledge had a yellow hull. Fresnel lenses focused the beam, and Trinity House tested bells hung about 18 feet underwater that ships could hear up to 15 miles away. Their visibility made them targets: in 1934 the RMS Olympic, homing on the Nantucket lightship's radio beacon in fog, ran down LV-117 and killed seven of its 11 crew.
- The Great Lakes storm of 1913 sank LV-82 Buffalo on Lake Erie with all six hands and LV-61 on Lake Huron.
- Permanent hull numbers began in 1867 because ships renamed for each new station were impossible to track.
- Lightship 114 was painted New Bedford for a station that never existed, then sank at its mooring in 2006.
- The US Coast Guard retired its last lightship, Nantucket I, on March 29, 1985, and about 15 survive in the US.
- Germany still runs unmanned automated light vessels in the German Bight with isophase lights.