WANT A LIGHTHOUSE? Please Buy the Gravelly Shoals Light So I Don't Have To

March 4, 2015
By: Dave Rogers

If you want to own a lighthouse, now's your chance.

"Gravelly Shoals Light is an automated lighthouse that is an active aid to navigation on the shallow shoals extending southeast from Point Lookout on the western side of Saginaw Bay," says the official description.

"The light is situated about 2.7 miles (4.3 km) offshore and was built to help guide boats through the deeper water between the southeast end of Gravelly Shoals and Charity Island."

Architecturally this lighthouse is considered to be Art Deco style. It was a project of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, built by the Works Progress Administration in 1939.

Actually, Bay City marine contractor John Meagher rebuilt the 61-foot high light, hauling the pre-fabricated sections to the site with a tug and his barge Marquis Roen. Suzanne Meagher David told lighthouse maven Terry Pepper that her dad beefed up the base of the light 15 years later for nearly seven times his original quote.

The lighthouse has been declared surplus and, if no caretaker is found, it will be auctioned off, according to a posting last May by lighthousefriends.com. Actually, the light now is listed as an asset of the National Weather Service, serving as part of a weather warning network.

http://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=174

OK, enough for the preliminaries. I have waited far too long to write this story, although my friends have all heard it and my wife Dolores just won't listen to it anymore.

The story could be titled DEAD ON THE GRAVELLY SHOALS.

Because, in 1951, that's what I almost was . . . Dead on the Gravelly Shoals.

It was early in my short sailing career. I had crewed for Joe Disette and Bob Maier in Lightning races in the time of the Lagoon Beach Yacht Club.

Sailors affectionately called Ronny Gougeon's modernistic house at Lagoon beach the LBYC, aka the Little Boys Yacht Club.

Then a close friend of mine, a Navy veteran, bought a 36 foot long sailboat, rated in Class A for competition.

I had been aboard just long enough to know how to let out and reef in the jib and mainsail as any good crew member would.

Handling the spinnaker was beyond my ken, but we would not be using the spinnaker until Sunday, July 4, 1951, when the gun would go off at 8 a.m. for the big Jolly Roger Regatta at Tawas.

It was the fateful morning of Saturday, July 3, 1951, when I boarded the Renlu. A photographer from the Bay City Times, I think it was the legendary Elmer Pincombe, arrived to do his thing.

The sports page headline of that day said it all: "Renlu Favored to Win Jolly Roger Regatta Sunday at Tawas.

So, the crew numbered three old sailors, all crusty World War II Navy veterans, and one neophyte 14-year-old --whoops, 13 year old, not to be 14 until August 11.

Most of my sailing experience had been in 8-foot Eddycats off the Saginaw Bay Yacht Club, a Victorian lady of near 65-year-old vintage. She sat perilously on pilings about 4 feet above the water, just high enough for a dingy to slip under her creaking timbers.

Rat shooting with BB guns under the club was our game, and a fun one it was, me mateys! But I digress into the happy realms of memory, when boys were boys and sailors never hollered "arrrgh" at each other like in the movies.

Actually, I should have been alarmed when the trio of old salts shipped aboard a case, mind you my memory is exact on this, a CASE of whiskey.

Dead men tell no tales, but living journalists do when they can get away with it and a brief entertaining ditty is the goal.

So as the night wind freshened and a sky full of stars twinkled like happy elves in the firmament lighting their pipes, the junior deckhand sailor was allowed to take the tiller.

After the 12 mile can, the vessel needed to angle northwest toward the destination port of Tawas where we were primed to take home the Class A Cup on a cakewalk sail the next day. Or so I thought.

"Keep her on this compass heading and you'll be dead on the Gravelly Shoals," said the old sailor with the captain's hat, repairing to the cabin with a handy bottle of grog.

Fateful words, indeed, "dead on the Gravelly Shoals he said."

Soon the washing waves and the flapping sails were my only company; shouts to the cabin drew no response. Frantically I let out the main, then the jib, slowing the slashing vessel.

The night became nearly as long as the one when the nuns put me behind the statue of St. Anthony outside the chapel door all night, although nothing can match that isolation with only a creaking building for companionship.

Alas, that's another tale to tell, over a grog or two perhaps.

Cutting to the chase: the thumping vessel made froth all night when, suddenly, the light of an instant dawn exploded and illuminated the bay -- and, by God, there was the Gravelly Shoals Light dead ahead -- maybe 50 feet in my memory now dimmed by nearly four score years.

Reefing the tiller hard a-starboard, we swept by the light with the wind; I could have touched the massive base, I thought. The morning was easing into daylight as I angled in toward Tawas, a helpful man ashore shouting "bring 'er into the wind, straighten 'er out, atta boy."

Needless to say the gun went off without the Renlu swishing across the starting line and sailing away from the competition to snatch the cup.

Nope, there were three sad sack sailors in the back seat of my mother's car after they woke up at noon. The evils of demon rum is an adage that would apply here.

So, please folks, somebody buy the Gravelly Shoals Light. Otherwise I will have to, and clinging to that lonely sentinel all night long is a job for a hermit that I don't want.

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