June 28, 2021

Team 3 headed out June 26 on a foggy Saturday morning for a three-day stay at the station. The team was headed by Cathy Allchin, with support from volunteers Peter Koeppen and Kailie Sjoblom and captain Joerg Rothenberger. Passenger Mark Lee rounded out the crew, heading out to assist contractor Carl Behrend with tuckpointing. This is the fifth light Mark has worked on. Lightkeeper carried a substantial collection of paint, caulk and mortar repair supplies to supplement the originally planned materials. Despite uncooperative weather, the project is coming along and the results are spectacular! As is often the case at the station, the project has been more difficult than expected. We’d seen the long unpainted soffit boards were in rough shape when we had been out earlier in June. We’d told Carl to “just do the best you can” given the circumstances. This consummate professional has done just that! He is absolutely doing the best he can including replacing missing wood, caulking, and applying additional paint to protect the old, dry, and shrunken wood. Where we’d specified whitewashing, he offered to tuckpoint first (which is the proper way to do things, we’d had to whitewash without tuckpointing on the volunteer portion of the project given we lacked the skills and this is one of those things it is better not to do than do so poorly.) He and Mark are going back and doing the work we were unable to do and then touching up the whitewashing. We cannot imagine working with more competent and conscientious folks. And, of course, the FILA team worked hard too, despite rainy weather. More to come…