10/10/2018
As promised, here’s the scoop:
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Like life in general, the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Project has been full of ups and downs, mixed in with some speed bumps, U-turns and empty fuel tanks. Though the endeavour has been fraught with a variety of unanticipated impediments, our commitment is made to the ideology that the “show must go on”.
Let me provide you with an update.
Once I managed to get through my nasty bout with endocarditis and then, just a few months later, open heart surgery, the project kicked into high gear as Cory and I made our way around the province. With a reasonably steady pace, we successfully captured lighthouse after lighthouse along the coastlines. Add in some appearances within news broadcasts in traditional print and online, as well as on radio and television, the project was in high gear. We were pleased with the progress, astonished by the attention and humbled by the support.
With almost every lighthouse on the mainland captured, focus was turned to the offshore lights. Since we have never accepted financial backing – hence personal savings have funded the project – and we failed to obtain sufficient volunteer services to get us to every island beacon, we were forced to consider altering the terms of this hobby project. After discussions with a dear friend about the potential change in course, we received some advice: crowd funding to raise money needed for fuel, hotels and the like so that we could finish what we started.
Shortly thereafter, we encountered a string of mishaps, missed opportunities and bad luck.
It began when I tried to post a lighthouse photo on social media as thanks for a local society donating funds to our cause. I plugged the external hard drive into the laptop and clicked the icon to open the folders. The hard drive responded with a peculiar series of noises and on-screen error messages. It was immediately ejected and, over the next several weeks, examined by several computer repair technicians. Each tech ultimately provided the same devastating message: the hard drive had a complete failure, resulting in the retrieval of absolutely no data.
Not only were photos and videos of several recent lighthouse captures now lost, but so were important family pictures, including the graduation ceremonies of my eldest child. I was devastated. My creative spark was ultimately impacted so much that I put the camera and the drone away for a while.
The crowd funding support from people throughout the province, around the country and even internationally, continued until the holiday season, at which point we decided to scale things back a bit until later into the new year. We had reached the halfway point of our goal, and felt it only proper to get ourselves out on the water, put the drone up in the air, and start capturing lighthouses again. That is, until I received a phone call.
The representative of a government agency (which herein will remain unnamed) on the other line of the phone advised they received notifications regarding the . Apparently, some person(s) had taken offence to the project, claiming it to be a commercial venture rather than merely a hobby, and hence issued a complaint(s). The verdict: since we had accepted money via crowd funding, the project transitioned from pastime to business. Though I argued otherwise – since not a photo was sold, not a dollar was taken for video footage, not a scrap of the project was beyond a true hobby, and that money raised was to help with getting us to locations, as opposed to fund the use of the drone – I was told that if I had captured any footage for the with a drone since accepting crowd funding, I would be in violation of the regulations and could be fined. Luckily, due of the loss of artistic passion after the hard drive crash, the drone had not been in the air.
With the loss of some lighthouse captures due to the external drive failure, the project no longer being accepted as a hobby according to the governing agency, and the stall in support to move beyond the halfway point of the crowd funding goal, a hiatus was necessary to problem solve. Not to halt the project, but rather to reassess and determine the best path to complete the venture while adhering to all regulations. As such, the past several months have been spent giving consideration to alternate methods of capturing the remaining lighthouses, as well as acquiring and testing equipment that could potentially allow me to still complete the task.
Then, just a couple of weeks ago, a spark of light at the end of the tunnel had finally begun to flicker. Newly proposed rules and regulations were announced pertaining to the use of drones, which appear to have a positive impact on the . Without inundating the reader amid technical jargon and legal wording, these changes could allow me to complete the venture with its initial intention: capture every lighthouse in Nova Scotia via drone. Though it still remains unconfirmed, as the final regulations have yet to be published in the Canada Gazette Part II 2018, our string of bad luck seems to be finally coming to a conclusion.
To meet the preferred level of the new regulations, I am currently working towards the purchase of a new, much smaller, drone that would complete the captures at the same degree of expected viewing quality.
We are committed to seeing this project through to its end. We have 28 beacons remaining to film, as well as another 10 that must be recaptured due to the loss of data from the hard drive failure. We are devoted to providing the time, planning, effort and travel to get every single one.
Put your name on history. Let’s complete this together. Visit:
The goal of the is to obtain video footage, via drone, of every lighthouse in the province and globally share the videos we produce from the footage. (Aerial shot of Cape Sable Lighthouse, the tallest in NS.) Through the project we hope to bring awareness to their condition a...
