Over twenty years ago, I went aboard the last Nantucket Lightship (MLV-612). It was a floating museum then and had been maintained in roughly the same condition as when she was in service, only a few years before. The primary difference was that as a museum she was tied up alongside a dock and not bobbing at anchor forty to eighty miles out in the Atlantic, marking the treacherous Nantucket Shoals.
Last night, the New York Ship Lore and Modeling Club was hosted on the Nantucket Lightship by its owner Bill Golden. She was moored in Manhattan’s North Cove, off the Hudson River, one of only three vessels in the mid-winter solitude of the usually crowded cove. She didn’t look so different from when I had seen her last. She had a better paint job but otherwise was the same high-sided squat little ship with her two towering beacons that had welcomed travelers to America even as she warned them away from the shoals. It wasn’t until I crossed the gangway and stepped inside that I realized how much the ship had changed.
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