Sheringham Point Lighthouse, Strait of Juan de Fuca

Sheringham Point Lighthouse, Strait of Juan de Fuca

by | May 24, 2020

Sheringham Point Lighthouse is located near the community of Shirley on Vancouver Island, 29 miles (47 km) northwest of Port Angeles and 27 miles (44 km) west-southwest of Victoria, British Columbia. The light station was built in 1912 and is still used for navigation.

On the night of February 26, 1862, the sailing ship Anna Barnard, bound from San Francisco to Sooke, British Columbia, approached Vancouver Island in the dark of night. Captain Olmstead and his seven-man crew could hear the pounding surf, but thick fog prevented them from seeing exactly how close to shore they were. Their luck ran out when the ship struck rocks a few miles from Sheringham Point.

Although the Carmanah Point Lighthouse marked the northern entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, there were still several nautical miles of unnerving darkness before a ship entering the strait from the north would see the light at Race Rocks. This dark void disappeared in 1912 with the establishment of the Sheringham Point Lighthouse. In 2010, after almost 100 years of service, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans declared the light station and surrounding lands surplus. Today, the Sheringham Point Lighthouse Preservation Society and the Capital Regional District are working together to restore the station and create a public park. Read more here and here. Explore more of Sheringham Point here:

About the background graphic

This ‘warming stripe’ graphic is a visual representation of the change in global temperature from 1850 (top) to 2021 (bottom). Each stripe represents the average global temperature for one year. The average temperature from 1971-2000 is set as the boundary between blue and red. The color scale goes from -0.7°C to +0.7°C. The data are from the UK Met Office HadCRUT4.6 dataset. 

Credit: Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading). Click here for more information about the #warmingstripes.

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