The lighthouse two and a half miles out from Port Austin

Stand on the beach at Port Austin on a clear day and look northwest, and you’ll see a stone tower sitting out on the open water with no land under it. That’s Port Austin Reef Light, more than two miles offshore at the very corner where Saginaw Bay swings into the main body of Lake Huron.

It’s out there for a reason. A rocky reef runs a mile and a half into the lake just below the surface — invisible, and right in the path of ships rounding the tip of the Thumb. Boats heading up from Saginaw Bay and boats running west both had to make their turn here, and plenty of them found the reef the hard way. The freighter Howard M. Hanna Jr. piled onto it during the killer storm of November 1913.

Building a light out on a submerged reef is no small thing. Crews framed up an octagonal crib down at Tawas, towed it across the bay, sank it on the shoal, and packed it with concrete to make an island where there wasn’t one. The light first burned in 1878. A fire and some hard winters later, the station was rebuilt in 1899 into the brick octagonal tower you see now, with the keeper’s house tucked against its base. The beam sits about 76 feet above the water.

Keepers lived out there, alone with the lake, until the light was automated and the last of them rowed ashore. The Coast Guard still runs the beacon, but the buildings would have crumbled if a group of locals hadn’t stepped in — the Port Austin Reef Light Association took on the lease and has been patching brick and raising money ever since. On the rare days they run boat tours, you can climb the tower and look back at the whole tip of the Thumb laid out behind you, the way the keepers saw it every night.