Wreck Logs - Light Houses - Wolf Rock
| Wolf Rock Lies 8.20 miles 226 degrees from Lands End. The Rock caused the wrecking of innumerable wrecks up until it was marked by the tower built between 1862 and 1870. Several attempts of marking the stone were made previously but the sea demolished them all. I’ve heard people say the name of the rock derived from the sound made by the wind as it howls through a crevice in the stone. The likelihood of this is small, as you wouldn’t hear a howl over the noise of breaking waves. It is thought more likely to have derived from the Cornish word gwelva meaning ‘viewpoint’ or ‘something to look out for’. Another derivation of the name is thought to have come from the word engulf, this has been mis-spelt over the years and the word evolved into Gulf, gulfe or gulph. Maps dating back to 1576 show the Wolf Rock marked as gulph. The lighthouse was built by James Douglass who made his first landing there on the July 1st 1861. Intending to survey the rock and establish the position of the new lighthouse, he was hauled back to the boat by rope after the swell picked up. The mammoth task of building such a tower was conducted from a work yard where the Trinity House depot now stands in Penzance. All of the stones were cut and shaped there so precisely that not one of them needed further shaping on-site. 3,297 tons of granite was used in building the tower alone, a further 1,078 tons were required to erect the landing platform. |  |
The Lighthouse stands 116 ½ feet to the lantern gallery, the first 39 feet being solid except for a space used as a water tank. The walls at the entrance door are 7 feet 9 ½ inches thick, gradually decreasing up the tower to a minimum of 2 feet 3 inches thick at the thinnest point near the top. The Entrance door, weighing a ton overall, is made of gun metal and is in two halves. Strangely the door opens inwards…a weakness you would think! However the greatest force on the door is withstanding the vacuum outside caused when water rushes over the door and the pressure inside pushes out! The door is situated on the lee side of the prevailing wind and the force of the pounding waves is exerted below the door level. In heavy weather a breaking sea is flung upwards easily reaching the lantern. At night this curtain of white water may reflect the beam back into the lantern room; this sudden bright flash can be terrifying to a new unwary keeper!
The last stone was laid on July 19th 1869 and the lantern was first exhibited on January 1st 1870. The original lantern was oil fired but was converted to electricity in 1955 with the installation of diesel generators. The light intensity is 378,000 candelas; it has a range of 23 miles and flashes every 15 seconds. The fog signal is a nautophone giving one blast every 30 seconds. The Tower was the first lighthouse in the world to have a helicopter landing platform fitted above the lantern.
My uncle, Peter James, worked for MAC scaffolding who rigged the scaffold for the helipad construction. After many failed attempts to land on wolf rock, the weather finally broke long enough for them to be allowed on to carry out the work. The rigging took a week but during this time the weather turned bad again and trapped them there for another week! There was enough food on the lighthouse to last the keepers a month but with double the people on the lighthouse the reserves only lasted two weeks, luckily the weather eased just as reserves were getting low. He told me that during the storms the whole tower shook with such violence that the TV would bounce off the shelf, to prevent this happening the keepers would sit with a broom propped against the TV to stop it coming off. He also said that the type of rock Wolf consists of is found only in one other place on earth, the Azores. It is so hard that it is said to ring when struck with a hammer!
It was not unusual for keepers to spend 12 weeks on continuous duty as opposed to the expected 8 due to foul weather and several keepers even suffered 14 or 15 weeks of continuous duty in really bad winters!
The iron cone (the base of a beacon constructed in 1840) on the landing platform
has hand and foot holes, it is designed as a shelter or something to cling
on to if a freak wave should come along while on the platform.
There is something about lighthouses that jumps out and screams “dive me”. The more remote the light house, the louder the scream. At 8 miles into the Atlantic from Land's End, the scream from Wolf Rock is hard to ignore.
With the rock sticking up in the middle of nowhere, it is easy to see why they built a lighthouse on top of it. It must have been a major hazard to shipping. Funny thing is that I have never seen any wreckage when diving it. Presumably any ship that struck the reef was subsequently swept clear and sank in deeper water.
A steep wall descends from the rock, with the chart showing it going down as far as 70 metres. To the northeast the top of the wall is almost immediately under the lighthouse steps. On the other sides a reef slopes out to between 20 and 25 metres before the wall begins.
I have never found out when slack water is at Wolf Rock. It is more a case
of when the conditions are good enough to get there, go anyway regardless of
the state of the tide. With an obvious current running, there is no time to
mess about on the surface. The boat runs in, engine in neutral, divers over
the side and down to 10 metres as fast as possible. Only at 10 metres do I
take time to settle down and locate my buddy, an easy task in the excellent
visibility. Not the normal start to a dive, but in practice the only practical
way to cope with such a dive site in a current and ground swell.
There is no bare rock, just a dense carpet of small and tough looking anemones of several different species and just about any colour I have ever seen anemones in. With a good 20 metres visibility the overall effect is stunning.
We follow a ledge deeper. At 45 metres the slope is still about 70 degrees and there is no sign of it levelling out. Having descended quickly to our agreed maximum depth, we start a more relaxed zigzag path back up. A typical computer dive profile. It is much easier to look closely at the marine life whilst ascending. Now I realise that it is not just anemones on the wall, there are also patches of hydroids, a favourite food for nudibranchs. Some types of nudibranch are violently coloured and easy to spot. Others are incredibly well camouflaged and take a bit of close in searching to find. Obvious clues are tight spirals of white nudibranch eggs strung against the hydroids.
With the blue filtered light, the colours of the jewel anemones are deceptive. Under a strong dive light patches of deep purple come out a violent florescent pink and similar colour changes are visible in photographs.
Small edible crabs cling tight to cracks in the rock, but no larger crustaceans such as lobsters or crawfish. I guess it is just too exposed for them.
Various types of wrasse are everywhere, pecking away at the growth on the rocks and keeping a curious eye on the divers. Away from the rock a shoal of something streams past, but I have no idea what kind of fish they are. Just a mass of silvery grey with fins.
Our zigzag path carries us back below the lighthouse steps. We know where
we are because there is a stream of miscellaneous junk scattered down the slope.
Small bits of metal, steel pipe, one or two bottles. Just little scraps drooped
from boats supplying the lighthouse over many years before it was automated.
Return to the top of this page
