NEAH BAY, Wash. – Flight Mechanic Patrick Gorlesky lay prone on the metal floor of the MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter, his helmeted head stretched out over the edge of the open doorway, considering the 100-plus foot drop to the deck of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Henry Blake beneath him.

At that moment, Gorlesky was the eyes of the helicopter, since the pilot couldn’t see straight down.

He shifted focus to the 2,000-pound crate attached on a 110-foot-long web to the helicopter’s belly. It was swinging, like a pendulum, from the light wind that was blowing through the slim channel. As the cutter waited in the unusually calm water between Tatoosh Island and Cape Flattery, at the northwesternmost point of Washington state, the helicopter’s blades flung briny rotor wash up toward the sky, and its shrill whirring sound filled the air.

“Right 10. Easy right. Hold. Easy down. Load is on deck. Ready to release load,” Gorlesky said to the pilot, Cmdr. Bill Timmons, as he guided the “helo” and its cargo toward the waiting deck of the 170-foot Everett, Wash.-based cutter.

It came to rest gently, and the crew onboard the Henry Blake took over.

As the Jayhawk broke from its momentary hover, the sling connecting it to its cargo detached, Timmons praised Gorlesky’s accuracy through the radio piped in to each of the crew’s helmets. 

“Wow, that’s perfect. Awesome,” Timmons said as he spied the square white crate far below in line with the others they’d set down earlier in the day. The four-man Astoria-based crew had spent the morning finishing a crucial step in the decommissioning of one of the country’s oldest lighthouses – taking out the garbage. And as space on the cutter’s deck was filled with the sub-compact car sized crates filled with fluorescent lamps, lube oil and lawn mowers, the job got a little tougher each time. 

“It’s harder because there’s less room,” Gorlesky said. 

Timmons swung the helicopter 180 degrees to the right, and the island panned into view. It was lush and choked with emerald foliage, and thousands of birds dove through the air above it, competing with the Jayhawk for airspace. The chunk of rocky earth jutted out of the ocean, ringed by nearly vertical cliffs. Besides the soaring lighthouse and a nearby outbuilding, a few ramshackle buildings dotted the green island, and a few meandering walking paths were carved into the vegetation.

An iconic historyThe white lighthouse and its trademark orange-red roof dominate the roundish, 20-acre mass of rock that juts out of the foaming, spraying ocean and guards the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While the structure itself forms a picture-perfect view from a distance, the 1857 lighthouse is no longer needed for navigation. 

It was built on the highest western point of the table-shaped island, perched 97 feet above the sea. The structure itself is made up of a sandstone keeper’s dwelling, complete with kitchen, dining room and parlor on the ground floor, and four bedrooms on the next floor. 

The 65-foot brick tower juts from the middle of the structure and an iron lantern room at the top of the tower held the light, a 10 1/2-foot-high first-order Fresnel lens built in Paris in 1854 by Louis Sautter & Company.

By 1977, all of its functions had been automated, so no keepers were needed on the island. In 1996, a solar-powered optic updated a fourth-order Fresnel lens installed in 1932, and made for less frequent maintenance visits.

The most recent innovation is a metal tower built in 2008 by the Coast Guard’s District 13 Aids to Navigation team, also based in Astoria. The team is working to button up the island’s structures so it can turn them over to the island’s physical owners, the Makah Indian Tribe.

An island in transitionJanine Bowechop is the executive director of the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay. She’s also the tribe’s historical preservation officer. Bowechop has lived in the area for most of her life, and said the island has been a special place for her people for many, many generations. 

“The island is an important area for us. For centuries we used the area for seasonal camps. They’d go out there for months to process whale and halibut because of its close location to the fishing areas,” Bowechop said. Access to the island is restricted by the tribe. Currently, the Makah reservation covers about 50 square miles of the most northwestern tip of Washington state, and includes the town of Neah Bay.

Initially, when the lighthouse was first built in the 1850s by the federal government, the Makah were skeptical of the presence of the lightkeepers. But as the years passed, they came to appreciate and respect the work they did to keep the treacherous waterway safe, Bowechop said.

The Coast Guard took over regular maintenance of the light from the U.S. Lighthouse Service in 1939, at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

As the lighthouse’s functions have changed over the years and technology has improved, the Coast Guard doesn’t need to visit the island as often. A discussion with the tribe has begun, with an eventual goal of turning the buildings over to their care. 

Gary Greene, the facilities planner for the district, said this is a national trend across the Coast Guard as modernization makes the historic – but beautiful – buildings obsolete from a navigational standpoint. This is especially true in District 13, which covers the Pacific Northwest.

“The Coast Guard has actively been trying to divest itself of lighthouses in the last 20 years,” he said. The Coast Guard doesn’t have the resources to historically preserve these icons, and has been moving to pass them off to entities that can do so, he explained. The process, he said, can take years to complete, considering that clean-up needs must be thoroughly assessed.

“There’s quite a bit of back and forth,” Greene said. 

Modernization and efficiencyThe trip was the third phase of the clean-up, dedicated to removing the heavy items, like a generator and a fuel tank, that could only go out by air because of the island’s nearly vertical cliffs.

Doug Cameron, equipment specialist for the Coast Guard’s District 13 Aids to Navigation, said of all the lighthouses the Coast Guard maintains, this is the last one left that needs helicopter support. 

The historic lighthouse’s light has been replaced with a 30-foot skeletal tower, and it provides a similar beacon for mariners that will only need to be visited once a year. The new light, visible from about 14 miles away, Cameron said, is fitted with six-year solar pack batteries, and five other batteries that need to be changed more frequently.

“Before this latest light went in, we had to go out every three months to rotate the batteries,” Cameron said. “There’s a considerable cost savings.”

Besides making modernizing changes that will save money, Cameron said he has enjoyed the string of overnight trips his team has spent on the island, and the challenge of coordinating all the entities to get the job done. That doesn’t mean things always go smoothly, he added. 

“Mother Nature is usually the one that jumps in on us,” Cameron said. 

Timmons said she gave them a pass that day, as the weather was just about as good as it could have been.

“We had everything in our favor that day – highly talented and experienced flight mechanics, light winds, calms seas, good weather overall…it was ideal from that aspect,” Timmons said. Still, the crew was ready for the unexpected.

“There are always variables and contingencies that that you don’t plan for but you try to rehearse through your mind just in case.. so that when confronted with something unplanned, you’re prepared to react quickly and positively,” he said.

Lighthouse buff checks out islandCapt. Doug Kaup, commanding officer of Group/ Air Station Astoria, dropped Cameron and his four-person crew off at the island five days earlier. They camped – no showers – for the week, preparing the loads on wooden skids for Timmons’ helicopter on Friday. 

Kaup relished the journey to the wild, overgrown island, even though he wasn’t able to set foot on it or tour its majestic lighthouse. He credits a visit to the St. George Reef  lighthouse in California for turning him into a lighthouse buff, and has visited many over the years as he’s worked around the country. Some of the neatest ones are here in Oregon.

“Most of the times they are in hostile places because mariners needed a way to keep out of harm’s way,” Kaup said. Tatoosh is a great example of the unique history of lighthouse keepers, who often lead solitary, thankless lives, he said.

“In some lighthouses, the men would die and the women would take over,” he said. Water and food was delivered, but mostly the keepers spent a lot of time maintaining the lifesaving equipment and keeping their solitary homes in order. The fragile Fresnel lenses, for example, had to be meticulously cleaned by hand every day, he said.

“It’s a breed of people – they had a lot of pride. We’d be hard pressed to find people like that now,” Kaup said. 

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