Ucluelet

The Pass of Melfort went ashore at Ucluelet on Christmas Day 1905 and everyone aboard was lost. A lighthouse followed the next year.

It was a square wooden tower on the rock at Amphitrite Point, put up cheaply with a kerosene lamp. George Fraser walked out from his cabin in the village to tend it, a return trip every forty-eight hours along a rough trail, in whatever weather the coast was doing. He lasted a year.

The tower lasted eight. A wave took it off the rock on 2 January 1914. A lantern was hung from the lookout behind it the next night.

Ucluelet was broke by then and asked for the replacement partly as work. The concrete tower that went up in 1915 is six metres tall and built squat enough to hold on. A keeper lived in it until 1928, when he resigned and said the place was unfit to live in.