Dick Cooper - October 2011

The Lightship Overfalls

A Beacon Into Maritime History

by

Dick Cooper

With flags flying from its mast and its bright red paint gleaming in the sun, the Lightship Overfalls looks like it is ready to steam out of its slip on the Lewes, Delaware, waterfront and report to active duty warning merchant vessels of shifting shoals. But it is not, and it never will again.
The 114-foot, steel-hulled ship now sits in her fancy slip surrounded by a manicured park taking retirement much like a derby winner put out to pasture. But she didn’t always look this good and it took a decade of dirty work, sweat equity and hard cash to bring her back from her derelict state of disrepair.
“She sat on the waterfront for years, rusting away,” says volunteer tour guide John Kyritsis. “She was vandalized and all of her brass was stolen. Her original wheel is probably a coffee table in someone’s den.
It is hard to believe that this Bristol-fashion ship had gone into such a sad state. From the stem to the stern, the Overfalls is as crisp as the day she was launched in 1938. In June, after a long campaign by the non-profit Overfalls Foundation and with the support of U.S. Senator Tom Carper, the vessel was designated as a National Historic Landmark. The $1.2 million project that included building a new permanent slip and landscaping came in on budget, says former foundation president Dave Bernheisel.
The ship is a reminder of the days when scores of lightships helped guide mariners along the coastal United States. Starting at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in 1820, they were stationed on shoals, at the entrance to ports and in locations where it was not practical to build a lighthouse.
They were equipped with lights, fog horns or bells and, in later years, radio beacons that allowed ships within 25 miles of their location to track in on their signal. The ships were painted bright red and their names spelled out in big block letters on their sides. They were named for the shoals or channels they marked. The ships were manned around the clock by sailors, first from the U.S. Lighthouse Service and later the Coast Guard.
By the 1970s, the ships were gradually replaced by more sophisticated buoys or Texas towers built on the ocean floor. Seventeen decommissioned lightships remain in varying states of repair in ports around the country. The Lightship Chesapeake has been a fixture in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor since 1982.
Part of the history of the Overfalls is that it never stood watch on the Delaware Bay’s Overfalls Shoal where a sharp drop in the bottom causes dangerous currents. That ship, LV 605, was replaced by a buoy and transferred in 1960 to duty in the Pacific Ocean and renamed the Relief. It is now open for tours in Jack London Square in Oakland, California.
The current Overfalls was the old Boston. It served on locations in Long Island Sound, near Martha’s Vineyard and finally at the entrance to Boston Harbor before it was decommissioned in 1972.
In 1973, the Coast Guard donated the ship to the Lewes Historical Society. The Society renamed it the Overfalls to honor the vessels that served off Lewes from 1898 to 1960, and moved her to a berth on the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal. And there she sat. “She was a rust bucket in a muddy hole,” says Bernheisel. In 1999, the Overfalls Foundation was formed by Merrill Kaegi, and in 2001 the Historical Society gave the ship to the foundation.
The volunteer corps of the foundation calls itself the “Dirty Hands Gang” and has logged more than 17,000 hours restoring the ship to its current condition. “Every Tuesday we have 12 to 15 volunteers, mostly retirees, show up for work,” says Bernheisel.
Walking around the decks of the ship, you get a sense of what life must have been like for the sailors stationed on her. The bow is high, designed to ride into the waves that would break against her hull in a heavy blow. The only ventilation below decks comes from a few air funnels on deck and opening port holes in the hull.
On display next to the Overfalls slip is its 7,000-pound mushroom anchor that held it in place. Our guide, John, points out the 3,000-pound auxiliary anchor mounted on the starboard bow.
“If the captain felt that conditions were severe enough, he would set the second anchor,” he says. How bad could it get to require 10,000 pounds of ground tackle?
As we walk around the side deck, John points to a fog horn on the cabin top. “It could be heard for five miles,” he says. “It was so loud that it could kill seagulls in flight. We had a visit from a Lightship veteran who said that once they were in a three-day fog. He got so used to the horn that he woke up when it stopped blowing.”
The Dirty Hands Gang didn’t stop on deck. Their restoration work, which is ongoing, has brought the crew’s quarters and mechanical sections of the ship back to life as well.
The first stop is the radio room, where two large banks of signal radios remain intact.
“Your cell phone can do more than these could,” John says.
As we climb down a steep set of steel stairs, he cautions that everything is made of metal and can easily cause bumps and bruises if we don’t watch out, and this is on a ship that is not rolling in the sea. In the crew’s Day Room, a checkerboard is spread out on the table, a reminder that when not on duty, the crew had few things to keep them busy.
The Overfalls was manned by a crew of 14, but they were never all on the ship at the same time. The men worked two weeks on and one week off, with only eight or nine of them aboard to man the ship around the clock.
The quarters of the crew are tight, with two bunks in each of the five cabins. Forward in the bow is the massive windlass used to raise the anchor. It is a complex system of interconnecting gears, levers and drums. A sign over the windlass reads, “WARNING TAKE TIME TO BE CAREFUL.”
In the wardroom near the back of the ship, the officers’ cabins have been restored and refurnished as they would have been when the ship was in service.
“A veteran of the ship came through and said this was the first time he had ever set foot in the Ward Room,” John says.
Back on deck it is a sunny, breezy afternoon, with the salt air blowing off the bay and the seagulls swirling overhead. The Overfalls seems to strain at her dock lines, itching to get out on the water and go to work.
For more information about the Lightship Overfalls, go to www.overfalls.org.

Dick Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He and his wife, Pat, live and sail in St. Michaels, Maryland. He can be reached at dickcooper@coopermediaassociates.com.