This Floating Lighthouse Guided Ships Over Sandbars for 50 Years
The Huron is now a museum, but it's still floating and honking to passing freighters
Port Huron — Docked in the St. Clair River near the Blue Water Bridge is a boat specially built for the Great Lakes. Large white letters spell HURON on its black hull.
The Huron was the last lightship to serve on the Great Lakes, decommissioned in 1970 after 50 years of service. There are only about 15 lightships left today, and of all those, the Huron is the smallest one.
The LV-103—it’s technical name—is now a permanent museum, carefully preserved and ready for your family to visit.
I’d never heard of a lightship before hearing about the Huron, but the concept is pretty simple: Instead of a permanent lighthouse on shore, you take a boat with a light on its mast out to where it is needed.
Like its more stable counterpart, the lightship also has a foghorn to sound when the mist obscures the Fresnel lens.
Stepping on board the Huron is stepping back in time. The sinks, the woodwork in the officer’s quarters, the bunks, the metalworking—it’s all from a different era but still shockingly functional.
You can see glimpses of what long, dangerous days would look like on the ship as well as the hardship of having to live in such close quarters on boiling summer afternoons performing tedious tasks to maintain the vessel.
It would have been hot, especially in the early days. The Huron had a coal-powered steam engine until 1949, when it was retrofitted with much cooler diesel engines manufactured by GM.
LV-103 primarily guarded ships against the Corsica Shoals, a shallow sandbar several miles north of Port Huron, but it also served in Lake Superior and Lake Michigan during its half century of service, which claimed the life of one crewman.
On May 7, 1958, Coast Guard Seaman Robert Gullickson went to get groceries from Port Huron. On the way back to the ship, a wave capsized the small boat and they went into the 47-degree water for 45 minutes.
After failing to hail help, Gullickson tried to swim to shore but succumbed to hypothermia. His body was never found. His death is a reminder of how scary the water and the waves can be on the Great Lakes.
Those elements make the Huron’s longevity more remarkable. It was the oldest active lightship at the time of its retirement.
Much of it still works. It still has a equipment on board to show freighters coming down the St. Clair River. While the foghorn is silent, the ship’s horn greets approaching vessels as if it is still on the water.
It’s rare to see a ship that’s almost as old as the Titanic standing ready for duty, but it’s almost like the Huron is still on the water, guiding the ships away from the shallows and toward safety.
For a few minutes, you can board the historic ship specially built to save Great Lakes sailors and understand the tireless duty in the service of others. It’s what’s required to be a guiding light above the frigid waters.
