Lightship Links

A short compilation of most useful links related to lightships, lighthoses and where you can get further info on it.

Russia

World Ocean Museum Irbensky Lightship is now in museum's property. I highly recommend this museum, which is one of the best technical museums in Russia featuring ships, flyboat, submarine that you can visit, and many other stuff

Russian Navy Archive They hold a huge vault of documents related to lights and signals. Located in St.Petersburg. Copying of documents only by permission and upon payment, or order a digitalization service from the archive

Central Navy Library Located in St.Petersburg, holds may navigation-related reference books where once can find info on lights and signals. Unlike the archive, in the library one can take photos of book pages with a smartphone.

Tsarskoye Selo Library. Large online library featuring many navigation-related books of XIX-XX centuries. Everything is freely downloadable

Kronstadt Historic Museum Located near St.Petersburg and exibits a scaled model of Irbensky lightship

Museum of Lighthouse Service First in Russia of its kind. Located near Kronstadt and St.Petersburg, on fort Konstantin in the Gulf of Finland

Latvia

Latvian National Archive Located in Riga and keeps a lot of valuable documents related to aids to navigation and development of waterways

Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation A place to visit in Riga

Lighthouses administered by the Free Port of Ventspils Thanks to the management of Ventspils city and its harbour, lighthouses Ovishi, Akmenrags and Uzhava are acting as both aids to navigation and a tourist attraction, and are available for visits. There is a small museum at Ovishi lighthouse. Near the latter in 1st half of XX century a lightship was moored

Germany

Feuerschiffseite.de (archive) Iris Klempau's project about lightships in Germany and all accross the globe. So unfortunately that the project is now abandoned, but you may visit it's copy in the Internet Archive

List of Lights (http://listoflights.org/)

German Ligfhthouse Society (http://www.ig-seezeichen.de/) Our friends that were toured by ourselves while they have visited St.Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast. Their members maintain a number of web-sites, including:

* http://www.leuchtturm-welt.net/ Lighthouses on the postcards

* http://baken-net.de/ A detailed description of German lights in the Baltic and Northern Seas

* http://phares.eljotroutes.net/ Lighthouse gallery. See Links section for the URLs of memorial lighthouses and lightships in Europe

United States

Lighthouse Directory The most extensive reference of noteworthy lights and signals of the world. Maintained based on open sources and site contributor's information. List of existing lightships is available in this section

US Coast Guard Lightship Sailors International A lot of various historical data, images and articles on US lightships

US Lighthouse Society History of the lighthouses in the US and other countries worldwide