Stonington/ Watch Hill Lighthouses

I would have made a lousy 19th century ship captain. My navigation skills are about as reliable as a wayward whale.

Or so my family reminds me whenever we embark on a road trip such as the one we recently took through New England.

Those hearty seafarers of yore could steer their way better by the stars than I frequently can with the aid of MapQuest.

So it was with some amusement that I greeted my wife's suggestion one morning that we deviate from the predictability of the interstate to spend the day in search of lighthouses. Having grown up on Long Island, she has always been fascinated by them.

She had even printed out some maps with directions that she'd organized into a tidy binder.

Directions! Now there was a novel idea.

Too bad she'd left it all sitting on the kitchen table back home in California.

Onward

Nonetheless, I was up for an adventure, and if I did somehow manage to get us lost, what better place to do it than in some historic coastal town awash in nautical lore? With its hundreds of miles of meandering coastline, New England is a lighthouse lover's paradise. There are more than 50 beacons in Connecticut and Rhode Island alone, built in all shapes and sizes, with roots that in several cases can be traced to the nation's infancy.

They have withstood fires, floods, fearsome storms, erosion and the passage of time to carry out their primary task: warning sailors of the hazards that lurk among the rocks and windswept shoals.

If only we'd known that finding these sentries of the shores can be as much a game of hide-and-seek as one of careful research and map-reading skill. Most are invisible from major highways, and a few aren't even located on the mainland, perched all by themselves on minuscule islands in the middle of bays or harbors. Some have been turned into museums or lie hidden behind private property. We had our work cut out for us.

Like a castle

Fortunately our adventure began in Stonington, a quaint Connecticut village of 18,000 situated five miles east of the famous Mystic Seaport. Turning off Highway 1 and heading south along a narrow alley otherwise known as Water Street, we wound up in the public parking lot at the mouth of Stonington Harbor.

The Stonington Harbor Lighthouse was among the state's first, commissioned in 1823 and relocated to its present site in 1840 after it was threatened by rapid erosion. No longer operational, the 35-foot tower with its attached keeper's house was purchased by the Stonington Historical Society in the 1920s and today serves as a museum.

The stone tower resembles a medieval castle fortress. Stepping through its claustrophobic entryway the visitor is transported to a time when whaling schooners ruled the waters of the Long Island Sound. For just a few dollars you can stroll up the granite spiral staircase to the light tower for an impressive view of the coastline and imagine what it must have been like to see the beacon ablaze, its rays magnified by powerful Fresnel lenses that were visible up to 12 miles out at sea.

Show us the light

The museum's volunteer staff helped shed some light on our quest, providing fresh directions to replace the ones we'd forgotten to bring. Still, finding our next stop proved to be as elusive as the pronunciations of several towns we had to drive through along the way.

There are towns with Native American monikers such as Wequetequock and Pawcatuck, which is the last Connecticut community on Highway 1 before you cross into Rhode Island at Westerly. Then there is Misquamicut, which we rambled through by chance on our fruitless search for the lighthouse in nearby Watch Hill, R.I.

You might think that finding someplace called Lighthouse Road wouldn't be too challenging. Perhaps not in 1745, when the original Watch Hill beacon was established chiefly as a lookout for French pirates.

But in the present day the once uninhabited coastline has become populated with oceanfront homes. Surely those property owners have seen the light, but our hopes for finding it dimmed the longer we cruised up and down hilly Larkin Road with our mapbook.

Like Stonington, Watch Hill offers visitors a museum. The structure as it exists today, with its 45-foot light tower of brick, was built in 1856 to guard the entrance to Fishers Island Sound.

That made the coast a safer place, but it did nothing to hold back the raw fury of the "Long Island Express" hurricane of 1938 that killed more than 600 people and heavily damaged communities as far north as Canada. Rhode Island was the hardest hit, with 100 deaths in Westerly alone.

Nor could it entirely prevent man-made disasters such as the sinking of a passenger ship in 1872 that claimed a hundred lives. It was that tragedy that spurred the construction of a U.S. Life Saving Service Station at the site, a forerunner of the Coast Guard. The station operated at Watch Hill until 1940. The lighthouse became fully automated in 1986 and remains in use.

Oh, well ...

We would have loved to see it in person, but in the end I mistakenly turned down a couple of private driveways and never did find Lighthouse Road. Hoping to avoid another ribbing on my impeccable sense of direction, I quickly chalked up the failure to hunger and convinced my wife and son it was time to stop in town for Italian gelatos. The oldtime sailors never had it so good.

Back on the road, we ventured east until we reached Point Judith, which is just south of Narragansett on the Block Island Sound. Not only was this lighthouse easier to find than the one we'd missed in Watch Hill, but it has a classy octagonal shape and is unobstructed by surrounding buildings, making it a delight to photograph.

The recently refurbished Point Judith light sits on a grassy knoll located on U.S. Coast Guard station property. Reaching the 51-foot brown-and-white structure is as simple as making your way through a gate and walking about 100 yards across the station's parking lot.

As we stood on the grass with nothing but the sound of a steady seabreeze and a lone sailboat providing the mood, it was hard to believe that at one time Point Judith saw more ship traffic than New York Harbor. The major gateway to expansive Narragansett Bay, it has also seen its share of shipwrecks, including one infamous night in 1896 when five vessels ran aground during an intense storm.

In those days the light was maintained by live human beings. But alas, the tower today is fully automated -- its beacon controlled by circuitry for the past half-century, its untended foghorn bleating out a mournful call at regular 14-second intervals.

Weather watch

From Point Judith, we dawdled north along the western edge of Narragansett Bay. It was growing late in the day and thunder clouds were amassing by the time we reached Warwick. A hard-working Colonial city of brick buildings on the southern fringe of Providence, Rhode Island's capital, the town is famous for a key event in the American Revolution -- the torching of a British warship in what came to be known as the Gaspee Affair. It is also home to Conimicut Point Park on Narragansett Bay.

The Conimicut Shoal Lighthouse -- sometimes referred to as a "bug light" for its unusual compact shape -- keeps a lonely vigil on what barely can be described as an island. Hundreds of feet offshore, it is a squat white structure with a cast iron base, about 40 feet tall and all but surrounded by water. Bug lights are fairly common throughout New England.

We didn't happen to have our inflatable raft handy, so the best we could do was admire this one from afar. Even if we had access, the Conimicut lighthouse is closed to the public, as most offshore lights are.

The need for all these lighthouses became clear in an instant as what had been a moody summer sky grew darker and suddenly ripped open in a torrential downpour. Even on high, our car's wiper blades couldn't sluice the water off fast enough, and busy rush-hour streets filled up like swimming pools in a matter of seconds.

I imagined myself as one of those ancient ship captains, caught in a similar storm with a hold full of whale meat, an anxious crew, and only that beacon of light to guide us to port safely. I bravely forded the flooded streets of Warwick.

"Honey, are you sure this is the right way back to the interstate?" my wife asked.

Pulled out of my daydream, I peered through the rain-streaked glass.

"What's MapQuest say?"