The Sound of Light

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The Chesapeake Bay's Floating Treasures

The offshore working lighthouses along the Chesapeake Bay provide sights and sounds unique to the region.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

Until now. Crammed on the narrow deck, amid smells of seaweed, suntan lotion and salt spray, we're a rumpled collage of baseball caps, hooded sweat shirts, windbreakers and sunglasses. One rotund fellow wears a khaki vest dotted with some 50 patches from lighthouses he has visited; another, a tall elderly gentleman, is ready for the elements in head-to-toe L.L. Bean. He nods my way. Thomas "Buck" Worthington is something of a world traveler who, it seems, has come home.

"The last time I was here, I was a boy," he shouts over the wind. "I used to ride on the keeper's launch, tucked in with the supplies and food. The launch left from the closest tip of land" -- he extends his arm south to the shoreline that is more than a mile away, where a mix of sagging bungalows and post-Hurricane Isabel renovations hug the water's edge. "They'd go out twice a day. Things were casual back then," he says. Worthington is a 10th-generation Annapolitan, who has long ties to the Arundel on the Bay neighborhood near Thomas Point. The lighthouse, he says, hasn't changed much, but the temperatures have. "My father and grandfather walked from Arundel on the Bay on the ice to Thomas Point light." He shrugs wistfully. "You're not going to see that again."

Ed Blanco and his wife, Omara, left their home in Miami in a hurry when they heard that visitors could now go inside an offshore working lighthouse. "We jumped on it," says Ed. "We got leave from work to come north. Came up Wednesday night, and go home Monday." In addition to Thomas Point, they will visit at least four other Chesapeake Bay lighthouses. This kind of obsession makes them "wickies."

A century ago, "wickie" referred to a lightkeeper who trimmed the wick to keep the oil lamps lit. Today it means hard-core lighthouse enthusiasts. Wickies are trivia buffs, taking note of every fact and figure in a lighthouse's history; some travel the world to as many lighthouses as possible and share their findings at local and national lighthouse events. As the woman in the bright red hoodie puts it, "They bring notepads and pens."

I confide to the group a dull truth about my life: I have never been inside an offshore working lighthouse. Ed Blanco flashes a look of charitable concern and says, "I guess that makes you a wickie wannabe."

Today, many offshore working Chesapeake lighthouses are like orphans hoping for adoption. The Coast Guard maintains the horns and lights as navigational aids, but not the actual structures. The Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse (the only screw-pile lighthouse in the United States still in its original location) got lucky, and in 2004, via the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act, was transferred to the city of Annapolis; it is now part of a complex partnership that includes the Annapolis Maritime Museum, which launched the interior tours in July 2007, and the U.S. Lighthouse Society and its Chesapeake chapter. Other offshore lighthouses are private retreats, benefiting from the passionate generosity of the individuals who purchase them from the federal government, agreeing to restore and maintain the historic structures, while the Coast Guard has access to the navigational aids. Sandy Point Lighthouse is privately owned, and a Falls Church resident owns Craighill Channel Lower Range Front Beacon, both on the north side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. An attorney from Nevada bought the Bloody Point Bar Lighthouse near Kent Island for $100,000, and according to Mike Richards, who pilots tours to off-shore Chesapeake lighthouses, he plans to restore it.

"Let's face it," Richards says. "There are more efficient ways to provide a navigational light on the bay. You drive a piling down into the ground and put a light on it with a solar reflector, and you never have to touch it -- heck, except maybe every two years. And you get the same function as the lighthouse. This is where the role of the private citizen comes in, recognizing these as historic structures. This is what will preserve the lighthouses."

A former real estate developer now living in his Tilghman Island bed-and-breakfast, Richards is a history buff who collects maritime oils and watercolors, a pragmaticmariner, the kind who calls the restroom in his home "the head." He captains his tours in a wide-bodied, retired Navy work-boat, M/V Sharps Island. These are not hasty drive-by, roll-down-the-window, point-and-click journeys. "We see the lights as a mariner would," he says, by which he means as part of a system of lighted buoys and beacons that form a fixed constellation that a mariner on the bay welcomes in the inky darkness. "The fix with the GPS is very accurate, but from my standpoint, I respect the lighthouses and use them," says Richards. "Young mariners don't pay any attention to them at all; they pass by them, say, 'Hey, it's a good place to fish.' "

We circle several lights in an afternoon, embarking from Tilghman Island's harbor. As we chug closer to Baltimore Harbor Lighthouse, I see a silhouette in the portal -- is someone there? About a mile and a half north of Sandy Point, Baltimore light is something of an uptown neighbor to Thomas Point light; it's privately owned. Four couples bought the lighthouse in 2006 in an online auction and occupy this four-story townhouse that just happens to be an octagon and is part of a 120-foot concrete caisson driven 57 feet into the mud.

It's a steep 20 feet from the water to the front door. On a clear evening, after work or on the weekend you might see the owners hoist a yellow Lab, legs splayed, dangling happily in a search-and-rescue harness. Up he goes from a rubber launch to the first-floor deck. The rope dangles back down. Next in the air, a large plastic tub brimming with supplies. The waterfront retreat has neither property taxes nor services, and the owners haul everything on board -- drinking water, inflatable mattresses, lumber, tripods, utensils, coolers, grills, gallon bottles of rum, limes, power tools, rain slickers and boots. Then they climb onto a cockeyed metal ladder, up to a second ladder, through the hatch to the first-floor deck -- and a spectacular 360-degree view of every boat heading to the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal or Baltimore.

Baltimore light is near the neck where Mark Jefferies, an avid sailor and one of Baltimore light's owners, grew up. "In Cape St. Claire, it was a regular occurrence to go out in a boat around this light, out on the Magothy River. I grew up passing by this light almost every day. It never occurred to me I'd be sleeping here."

Unlike Brosius, who slept through the foghorn at Thomas Point, Jefferies is a light sleeper. "I've been at Thomas Point when that thing blows. I could never sleep through that," the 36-year-old says. "I'm up every two hours all night long at the light. There are the strangest noises: Every ship going to the port of Baltimore takes a turn at this light. Freighters, car carriers, one after another, they roll by. I wake up at night to a regular procession of tugs, the low rumble of ships going by." Some evenings when it's especially calm, Jefferies says, he can hear a dog barking on land 1 miles away and the rumble of traffic on the Bay Bridge. "I can even hear the crunching of bait fish chomping, feeding on the barnacles along the water line."