The North Manitou Light Keepers offered trips to Lake Michigan's iconic offshore lighthouse The Crib this summer with a very special tour guide on board: retired U.S. Coastguardsman Coby Thenikl. The Lake Ann resident and 1970 graduate of Suttons Bay High School rode along on the boat to the light and shared glimpses into his own wild ride on deck there for two shipping seasons. (There are stories that he just may have cruised a motorcycle around the perimeter…)

Before 1980 — the year the United States Coast Guard automated the North Manitou Shoal Light Station (aka The Crib) — personnel were stationed there on a three-week rotation: two weeks on and one week off. Thenikl was among those who served.

What is it like to live on an offshore light? He tells the Leelanau Ticker that after his first duty out of boot camp at Governors Island in New York Harbor, “it was a vacation.” But by the second year, “the walls starting coming in.” He and two other crew members at a time arrived in April to open it up and stayed until the end of the shipping season in November. The lighthouse was — and is — nicknamed “The Crib” because its foundation stands on a wood crib constructed in Empire, filled with boulders and timbers and sunk to the lake floor.

“We were the last manned lighthouse in the Great Lakes,” he notes. Thenikl left The Crib in 1978, heading to St. Ignace, then Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, and other Coast Guard stations around the country.

Once mothballed in the 1980s, the steel lighthouse stood operational but vacant, succumbing to benign neglect (and lots of bird droppings) over the next 40 years. In 2016 it was deemed excess property by the federal government and bid on at auction by the North Manitou Light Keepers (NMLK) which wants to restore it.

The structure itself — completed in 1935 to mark a shallow shoal for vessels passing through the Manitou Passage — is now owned by the nonprofit NMLK, but the Coast Guard still maintains the equipment that aids navigation today.

And behind the scenes at the lighthouse is a remarkable story of its rehabilitation by its new stewards.

Thenikl tells the Leelanau Ticker he’s thrilled to see it gleaming again with a fresh exterior paint job (especially after countless hours he himself spent painting and maintaining it) and he’s equally happy that the interior will also be restored to its 1935 glory. When he lived there in the late 70s, the living quarters were relatively unchanged from that era, he says, down to the retro eat-in kitchen, radio room, and the “institutional green” his bedroom was painted.

Also big news: The Crib’s sea doors, which were welded shut by the Coast Guard in 1980 are now able to be opened. And NMLK is moving forward with its next goal: offering overnight stays.

Thenikl says living on a sentinel soaring 66 feet in the middle of the lake means experiencing both “beautiful sunrises and beautiful sunsets…and heavy seas. There were 20-foot seas that would hit the lighthouse hard enough you would feel the lighthouse vibrate.” Once the foghorn ran “for five days straight” and in November, “when ice starts to form on the lighthouse, you’d have to be really careful going outside.”

There was never a rescue in his time, but “we were prepared to.” In addition to maintaining the light, sending weather reports to Charlevoix, and keeping watch on the Manitou Passage, there were long stretches to fill.

“Everyone took a turn with meals…we’d make a cake or a pie and we had a freezer full of steak.” Thenikl passed the time building a motorcycle. “We would go to South Manitou Island to fish, and we played a lot of pool.”

Their original pool table — “competition sized, and we used to set up a ping pong table on top of it” — was found in a home in Leland, then moved to an art studio and now is waiting in storage in Cedar. “It will eventually be returned here,” he says. There was a TV, too, with iffy reception. “We were into All My Children,” he laughs.

He took occasional trips to the mainland: “We would go to Leland to the grocery store and post office and sometimes we’d go to the Bluebird,” but for the most part the crew depended on the Grosvenor family of the Manitou Island Transit to ferry mail or sundry items to the light.

These days it is Manitou Passage Boat Tours and their boat Bear that makes the trek, partnering with NMLK to transport tourgoers to The Crib.

Captain Geoff Niessink, also assistant chief at Leland Township Fire and Rescue, explains that he and Captain Jimmy Muñoz are partners in operating Bear for trips and tours in the Manitou Passage. “Bear primarily does the tours to The Crib but also has been taking people to the lighthouse on South Fox. There is a restoration project going on over there as well.”

On one of Niessink's trips to The Crib this summer with Thenikl on board, they had a surprise visit from four Coast Guard personnel who were out on patrol as part of the law enforcement/search and rescue division. “They had come from Frankfort,” Niessink says. “They all seemed very impressed with The Crib and excited that it was being restored. They advised that others at their stations would be jealous that they got a tour and suspected that we may see other Coast Guard visitors stopping by when they are in the neighborhood.”

Regular tours to the light will continue in 2023, as will a series of ambitious restorations. Follow the progress on North Manitou Light Keepers (NMLK) Facebook and Instagram. 

Check out more photos with Thenikl inside The Crib and the U.S. Coast Guard's visit to the light on Leelanau Ticker’s Facebook page. 

Pictured: U.S. Coastguardsman Coby Thenikl, Retd.