See update at the bottom.
The Deck Logs for U.S. Lighthouse Service (USLHS) vessels were written in a standard ships log book printed specifically for this purpose. The first Deck Log book for the Lightship 116-538 was opened on 31 July 1930 and included entries through 14 February 1931. These standard log books also included special entry pages at the beginning and end. Use of these special USLHS Deck Log books ended in 1939 with the transfer of the USLHS to the US Coast Guard. I have listed them by Book # on the web page of the year the first entry is dated.
In this section of the web site, you can view a copy of the Lightships Deck Log for the years, month and days posted so far.
To see them, use the pull-down menu to select the Year you are interested in and click on it. In that new page, all the months are listed. If the numbered date is a color other than black, then it is a link to the Deck Log for that day. Click on the date and a new screen should open showing the log. These are pdf files so you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to view the Deck Logs.
These views of the Deck Logs were scanned from a photo copy of the actual Deck Log that a volunteer located in the Nation Archives and made a photo copy of.
Please be patient if the Year, Month and Day you may be looking for is not posted. Lightship # 116-538 was in commission and used as a U. S. Lightship from August 1930 until January 1971. That is almost 40 years of daily Deck Logs, or more than 14,750 days. The project to locate that many original historical documents, photocopy them, scan them and then post all of them to this web site is a long-term project that is expected to take at least another five+ years.
NOTE: In a recent agreement between NARA and the VA, NARA has provided the VA with ALL US Coast Guard vessel deck logs for 1960 to 1972. The VA will scan them so they can use them for Agent Orange claims and then provide NARA with the digital files. NARA intends to post ALL of those deck logs to there web site in the future. Therefore, I will be focusing on 1950 to 1959 deck logs WHEN NARA opens back up for research.
updated 31 July 2020