A couple years ago, there was a school bus out there with a load of kids, and they were in the lighthouse when a big wave swept all the way around the lighthouse and turned the school bus on its side. Luckily, the kids were all inside the lighthouse. |
It's sort of the icon for the community of Bandon. |
Sometimes in the fall we'll see 20 or 30 of these birders, dressed out in Abercrombie & Fitch clothing with their spotting scopes, looking at some little dickey bird. The word gets out that there's some shorebird that's rare, and they all flock to the coast to look at it. |
The foundation is cracked, and you can't let that go on too long. Especially not when you have waves breaking up around the lighthouse. |
There was a lot of debate whether these jetties should have been built. It might have been better if they'd gone further north. There's a rock reef here about 12 feet below the surface, so there's no way to ever get a real deep channel here. When you have swells of 6 or 8 feet, you don't have enough water for safe passage. A little farther north, there are no rock reefs and they'd probably have had a safer channel. |
This is not a bar for novices. Bandon has some great fishing because of the fact it's so hard to get over the bar here, so it's not over-fished like so many places. The fishing is still superb because people don't go out much. |
We have a solar-powered light in there so that at night, in Bandon, you can see it blinking. But it's just for aesthetics. |