This site dates back to April 1999 when I stumbled on the last 10 - 15 minutes of a Maryland Public TV program on Chesapeake Bay lighthouses. It was created by a group that started at the mouth of the Bay and worked their way north via sailboat, hitting each of the lighthouses along the way. (I never did see the rest of the documentary.) At that time my wife and I had owned our Hunter 28 sloop Moondance for a couple years and were getting pretty heavily into cruising. We also own a Volkswagon Westfalia camper-van (the Blue Beast) in which we've done a fair amount of traveling. I knew almost nothing about the Bay lights (even that there were many). However, as the weeks passed this idea began to seem a neat connect the dots way of seeing and learning about the Bay and surrounding region. I did some research on the web, bought and read a few books and we began to incorporate lighthouses into our cruises and camping trips. From there it kind of exploded . . .

I decided that if we were going to visit the lights I should take pictures. Then I thought "Why not create a web page? It will be a good way to learn .html". Once I put the photos up, they each cried for some sort of historical summary. Then I decided some over-all context was needed. As I learned some .html tricks (frames, image roll-overs, includes, javascript, etc.) they got incorporated.

We began trying to visit and photograph each lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay (34), then added the Lightship Chesapeake (35), then the lighthouses and lightships of the surrounding seaboard as well (43). This latter part was driven largely by our discovery of the Chesapeake Chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society's 40 + 3 Club. Finally, our circumnavigation of the Delmarva Peninsula led to the addition of the lights of the Delaware River and Bay (an un-defendable scope creep combined with a fair amount of frustration because a camera shutter failure resulted in loss of all of the DE caisson photos I took, not to mention photos of the pod of dolphins off our bow as we sailed away from the Atlantic coast.) During this time I also started providing research for the U.S. Coast Guard's pages on a volunteer basis and wrote up their Maryland Light Statons page, which includes many lights no longer standing. More and more personal stuff also found its way onto my site.

I originally posted this site on a free web host. But, the pop-ups drove me nuts. After that, I moved it to the free web space provided with my personal dial-up ISP account. Eventually, I registered the cblights.com domain, found a proper ISP, and moved the site.

During the time above, the Chesapeake Bay Lighthouse Project has existed in three major incarnations. The first was a frames based site that looks pretty dated today, even though I liked the color scheme at the time (although it looked like poop at lower resolutions).

In the Fall of 2002 both we and the site were written up in a number of magazines including SpinSheet, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, and Ira Black's NorEaster. This spurred a complete face lift, ditching of the frames, and the use of image-mapped menus. The site was still 100% .html at that point, largely because the free web space I was using didn't have any fancy features. It looked OK, but not truly professional.

I work as an information system engineer and had been managing a fair sized content management implementation project. This put me in contact with "real webmasters" and I got a bit embarrassed by my site. Although I consider myself a jack of all trades, my forte is enterprise architecture, network security and server / networking infrastructure. Working with code doesn't bother me, but I'm pretty poor at graphical design and am not particularly comfortable with PhotoShop beyond the basics. So, how shall I put it? - The current site design is "very heavily influenced" by the one used by the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Education and Museum Studies, the development of which was managed by Joanna Champagne (a great PM, who I think did a wonderful job. Imitation is the sincerest form of complement - right?). I thought this would be a somewhat of a quick way to give it another facelift. However, the site makes heavy use of javascript on the back end and by the time I had backwards-engineered it, re-done code, added server side includes, done the image work, pulled in all the content, etc. I had many hundreds more hours invested (and it's still not done!) Anyway, when it got to the point I figured it was as good or better than it's predecessor, up it went (February 2004).

After that it sat for a couple years with only minimal edits (mostly corrections). I never really liked the menu that I started with (still used in the Lights section), and in 2007 we started thinking seriously of cruising "for real". So in July of that year I did a quick and dirty update of the cruising and miscellaneous section menus to one based on javascript that loads faster, doesn't get mis-represented in search engines, and is easier to update. I don't have the stomach for another facelift to the site, though it could use one. I've learned a lot from its itterative development.

I've got to admit, I have a love-hate relationship with the lighthouses now. People want to catagorize you as a "lighthouse junky" and start telling you how they think of you every time they see a light etc. Worse yet, there are a lot of really trashy lighthouse-themed gift items out there they want to give you. I've really had to stress that for me it's the Chesapeake Bay. The lights transport me to an era with different centers of commerce, regional dialects, gritty watermen, and with steam-liner routes and resort communities that no longer exist. I just love the water and am lucky to have a partner that shares in my passions (or maybe it's vice versa). I hope this site helps you find your own appreciation for the region, its history, and evolution.