At the very tip of Point Loma, visible against the sky from the bay entrance, a small white lighthouse silhouette marks the summit of the peninsula. It looks correct there — lighthouse, high point, ocean below. The problem is that it was wrong, for its entire operational life, and it took the government 36 years to admit it and do something about it.
The Old Point Loma Lighthouse was first lit on the evening of November 15, 1855. It was one of eight Pacific Coast lighthouses authorized simultaneously by Congress, and it was placed at the summit of the Point Loma ridge, somewhere between 422 and 462 feet above sea level — making it, at the time, the highest lighthouse in the United States. The lens was a state-of-the-art Fresnel lens imported from France. On a clear night its beam could be seen 25 miles out to sea.
San Diego, on the whole, offers excellent weather. But the fog that moves inland from the Pacific tends to hug the ridge at exactly the altitude where the lighthouse stood. When that happened — which was frequently enough to matter — the lantern sat inside a cloud, invisible to ships below, shining light into moisture rather than across water.
Ships approaching the bay entrance at night, in fog, could not see the light that was supposed to guide them. The lighthouse was functioning. The lamp was lit. The Fresnel lens was doing exactly what it was designed to do. It just couldn't be seen from the surface of the water, which is where the ships were.
The lighthouse was decommissioned in 1891, 36 years after it was first lit. A new lighthouse was built lower on the Point Loma shoreline — close enough to the water that fog rarely engulfed it — and lit for the first time in March 1891. The difference in elevation between the old lighthouse and the new one is approximately 330 feet.
The new lighthouse is still operating. It is an automated light now, no lighthouse keeper required, sitting near the waterline on the rocky shore just inside the bay entrance. You sail close enough to it to see the white concrete base when JADA approaches or exits the bay.
The old lighthouse was preserved rather than demolished. It is now a historic landmark inside Cabrillo National Monument, maintained by the National Park Service. You can walk through it, see the room where the keeper lived and tended the light, and look out at the view the keeper had — the same view that made the location seem so obviously correct, and that the fog made so persistently wrong.
Sources: National Park Service, "The Lighthouses of Cabrillo National Monument"; Wikipedia, "Old Point Loma Lighthouse."
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