From the bluffs at Año Nuevo Point you can see a low, bare island a short way offshore. A pale two-story house stands near its southern end. Nobody has lived there since 1948. Sea lions and elephant seals sleep against its walls now.
That house belonged to the keepers of the Año Nuevo Island light station. Their lives out there are the reason this stretch of coast found its way into my first book.
New Year's Point
Spanish sailors with Sebastián Vizcaíno's expedition passed this headland in 1603. They named it Punta de Año Nuevo for the day they first saw it. For the next two and a half centuries it was a landmark more than a danger.
That changed with the Gold Rush. Coastal traffic between San Francisco and Monterey grew fast. The rocks off this point began collecting ships. The clipper Carrier Pigeon went down nearby in 1853. The Sir John Franklin followed in 1865. The Coya was lost the year after.
In 1870 the government paid $10,000 for the island and a parcel on Pigeon Point. The big first-order lighthouse went to Pigeon Point. Año Nuevo got a fog signal instead.
A whistle, then a light
The island's twelve-inch steam whistle first sounded on May 29, 1872. Steam meant boilers. Boilers meant water, so the keepers collected rain in a cistern. A seawall kept the surf off the signal building.
The keepers lived at the south end of the island. A wooden walkway ran north to the fog signal. The station did not get an actual light until February 12, 1890. Later a fourth-order Fresnel lens went into a lantern room on top of the redwood water tank. In 1914 it moved to a steel skeleton tower.
Most keepers lasted a year or two. The records do not say why, but the island explains itself. It covers about nine acres. Fog sits on it for weeks. Every trip for mail or supplies meant a boat ride across a narrow channel. Swells wrap around both ends of the island and meet in that channel. The result is breakers and strong currents in water that looks calm from shore.
April 8, 1883
On that Sunday, keeper Henry Colburn and his assistant Bernard Ashley set out for the mainland. Two brothers from a nearby dairy, Clayton and Frank Pratt, were with them. The sea was rough. Their boat was swamped in the channel and carried out to sea. All four men drowned.
Their wives were left alone on the island. They started the fog signal. They raised the flag upside down at half-mast, the old signal for distress. A passing steamer, the Los Angeles, saw it and sent a small boat across. John Ryan came over from Pigeon Point to take charge of the station and help the widows leave.
That is the whole of what the record says. It gives the names and the date. It says nothing about how long the women waited, or what they told each other while the whistle ran.
Sea lions in the house
The island always belonged more to the animals than to the keepers. In 1899 the State Fish Commission got permission to thin the sea lion herd, which fishermen blamed for poor catches. The killing began. Public protest stopped it within days.
By 1916 the keepers were complaining to anyone who would listen. Sea lions were getting into the house. Their barking kept the families awake all night. The newspapers ran the story across the country. The keepers were still forbidden to harm them.
At 4:40 in the morning on October 22, 1926, an earthquake knocked the oil lamp into the lens. About a third of the prisms fell out. An hour later a second quake tore the lens off its table. The keepers swept up the glass and waited for a replacement.
Going dark
The station was shut down in 1948. A whistle buoy about 1,600 yards south of the island took over its job. The buildings were left to the weather and to vandals.
In March 1958 a bidder named Frank Spenger bid $100,000 for the island at a federal auction. He planned to build a resort. The State of California held first rights. It took the island that April for $51,094. In 1976 the state cut down the steel light tower before it could fall on its own. It still lies where it landed.
Today the island is part of Año Nuevo State Reserve. It is closed to the public. UC Santa Cruz scientists use some of the old buildings for research. Elephant seals breed on the beaches. Since 2010 a group called Oikonos has worked to restore the native plants and burrows of the rhinoceros auklets that nest there. The sea lions trample both.
The island keeps getting smaller. As late as the 1700s it was still joined to the point. The channel the keepers crossed is wider every decade.
Why it stayed with me
I grew up on this coast. I've seen that house from Highway 1 more times than I can count. For years it was just a ruin on a rock. What changed it for me was the account of the two keepers' wives, left alone on that rock in 1883. They kept the whistle running. They turned the flag upside down and waited for someone to come. The record gives them no names. I couldn't stop thinking about them.