12 Lights a

Ever wonder how a lighthouse gets fresh paint?  Carl Behrend paints them from a bosun’s chair.  This particular light–Seul Choix— is located on the south side of Michigan’s UP.   It turns out, he’s also a singer-songwriter who has written a song about this light. 

The only way you can get to this light is to want to get there.  By land, it’s at the dead end of a dirt road in Gulliver, MI.   It’s not far from Port Inland, MI.  By looks of the trim, Carl does a great job of painting the light.  And what did you think . . . boats,  bridges, and other things get painted, so why not lighthouses and from bosun’s chairs.

The tower to the right is likely not a navigational aid, but I’ve kept a series in the hopper embarrassingly long, and so this is my preface to taking them out.  Anyone guess the location of this photo from a friend who has since moved away from the water?  Answer in a few days, along with the rest of the set which’ll easily give away the location.

With all the scaffolding, it appears that Sandy Point Shoal Light just north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge was about to get a painter on the premises last spring.

Behold Grand Island East Channel Light, a rare wooden structure.  It lies along the north shore the Michigan’s UP on a bay of Lake Superior.  As with many lights, it’s currently privately owned.

This lighthouse is 30′ structure atop a building, and if you were in high school before the internet and online search engines, you probably have seen a line drawing on this light when it was the logo of H. W. Wilson Company, the folks responsible for the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, where you went to find source material for writing a research paper, back when if it was in print, it was generally to be believed, or so I was taught to believe. Wilson was founded in 1898 and is now merged with EBSCO, a prominent current academic search engine.

Not all lights are lighthouses.  Here are a set of range lights near Turkey Point Light at the north end of Chesapeake Bay.

This is Port Colborne Outer Light, on the pier jutting into Lake Erie on the west side of the channel.

If you’re counting up to 12, the next two photos are the same . . . Sodus Outer Light, near where I learned to swim.

Above you see a March view, and  . . . below, that was July.

This is as close as I came to Cape Lookout Light, so a return with a trip to the National Seashore there is truly on my list.

Esopus Meadows Light has appeared on this blog before here and here and elsewhere,  but this is the first time I managed to line up the Light and Wilderstein.

This light beneath the GW Bridge technically is called the Jeffrey’s Point Light, but I’ve never managed to learn who the Jeffrey involved was.

Closing this out, this is Buffalo Main Lighthouse.  Click here for a few great vintage photos.  The turbines in the background make up part of the Steel Winds site, power generation on the grounds of one of Buffalo’s old steel mills.

All photos by Will Van Dorp.