The boat takes a final spin around the lighthouse so passengers can take photos like this (Jeff Holland)

I remember my first sight of the odd-looking structure out there in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. It must have been 1974 when I went on the first of many sailing trips with my father, Bill Holland, a summer cruise in between college semesters. We had chartered a small boat from Oxford and on our way to Annapolis, we approached what looked like a white, six-sided cottage with a red roof perched on stilts. I said, “What the heck is that?”

“That’s the Thomas Point Light,” Dad told me.

I wasn’t impressed. It didn’t look like any lighthouse I’d ever seen. If this is what they called a lighthouse around here, I thought, it’s no wonder nobody’s ever heard of this place called “the Chesapeake Bay.”

Well, I hadn’t heard about it, anyway. I grew up around Pittsburgh, 300 miles west, on the other side of the Allegheny Mountains. Dad tried to convince me that we were looking at one of the most iconic sights in all of Maryland.

We had a good look at it, too, the big black boulders piled on the north and south sides, the narrow balcony surrounding the main floor with its cookie-cutter balusters, the gabled windows protruding from the red tin roof that was drizzled with an icing of white seagull . . . effluent.

While our sails were full and we were heeled over, we didn’t seem to be passing the lighthouse very fast. In fact, we seemed to be standing still if not drifting in the wrong direction.

The wind was pushing us up the bay, but the ebbing tide was pushing us back. And the tide was winning. Lubbers that we were at the time, we didn’t notice that the little rubber dinghy we were towing behind us had flipped over in the wind and was acting like a sea anchor, dragging us backwards toward the rocks.

Dad and I managed to survive that cruise, and a few years later we sailed back to the bay on his newly acquired 30-foot sailboat. We had sailed from Lake Ontario, down the Erie Canal, down the Hudson River to New York Harbor, out on the Atlantic around New Jersey, up the Delaware Bay and down the Chesapeake to Annapolis, and I’ve been here ever since.

My father has been gone some years now, but every time I get out on the water, I thank him for the gift he gave me, introducing me to this amazing place and that astonishing lighthouse.

It was built in 1875, a mile and a half off of the tip of Thomas Point proper, at the end of the shoal that had been snagging the keels of too many ships since they started coming over from England in the early 1600s. There had been two prior lighthouses on shore, but they were too remote to be effective and prone to erosion.

Yet how do you erect a lighthouse on the soft, muddy bottom of the bay? A blind Scottish engineer came up with the solution: Drive a bunch of long iron pilings into the mud. These piles have large screw-shaped blades on one end. Twist these into the mud like a corkscrew and eventually they’ll become secure enough to build a platform on top of them. Construct a cottage on the platform with a bright light on top, and there you have what’s known as a screw-pile lighthouse.

This design was successful for a while; there were 41 screw-pile lighthouses up and down the bay at one point. Most all of them got swept away or crushed by ice floes. There used to be one off of Greenbury Point at the mouth of the Severn River, but it got damaged by ice and was eventually demolished. The Hooper Island Strait light got moved to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels.

The Drum Point light is now on display at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons. The Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse is the last one left in its original location. It’s ironic that its best defense against damage from massive icebergs turned out to be global warming.

The Coast Guard was going to tear down the Thomas Point light in 1972, but the public put up such a fuss that instead it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. It was the last manned lighthouse on the bay when it was automated in 1986. With no one to take care of it day-to-day, the structure became too costly for the Department of the Interior to keep in repair, so in 2006 they turned it over to a partnership between the City of Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, the Annapolis Maritime Museum and the Chesapeake Chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society.

John Potvin shows the traveling library filled with books too boring to read (Jeff Holland)

On top of 20 years of neglect, the lighthouse was heavily damaged by Hurricane Isabel in 2003, but today its restoration is nearly complete.

I took two tours this past season to admire the progress of countless hours of labor conducted by countless volunteers under the direction of John Potvin, manager of Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse and a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society. In addition to all that volunteer time, the society has also raised and spent about $1.5 million on materials and contract labor too technical for volunteers to handle.

One afternoon last fall, I met Potvin aboard the traditional Chesapeake deadrise boat Bodacious at the docks of the Annapolis Maritime Museum in the Eastport neighborhood. Bodacious is owned and operated by Capt. Howard Lewis to ferry the tour guides and guests out to the lighthouse. Howard also has the distinction of being the grandson of one of the former lighthouse keepers.

I was there along with a half-dozen other eager lighthouse enthusiasts on the tour. It took about a half hour to maneuver out of the mouth of Back Creek and down the Severn River, around Tolley Point and into the open Chesapeake Bay. The approach to the lighthouse is dramatic. That view you’ve seen in countless photographs and paintings, even on a U.S. postage stamp, comes closer and closer until Capt. Howard skillfully pulls up to the wooden pier at the base of the structure that’s been built there to receive guests.

We were carefully guided onto the deck and up the ladder to the storage platform underneath the cottage, where docents filled us in on the background and history of the place. The 360-degree view of the bay from there is breathtaking. You can see initials and graffiti chiseled into the rocks by bored keepers over the decades.

Jeff Holland takes a peek up into the lantern room at the top of the lighthouse (Jeff Holland)

We scooted up another ladder and through a hatch in the deck of the balcony and got an in-depth tour of both floors. We even got a peek up into the lantern room at the top, where the actual lighthouse light spins 24 hours a day, fending boats off the shoal. Several of the rooms have been lovingly restored to their original 1875 style, complete with a pot-bellied stove and a boxed traveling library packed with the classic books the keepers were forced to read out of dread boredom. Other rooms have been restored to the era when the U.S. Coast Guard last manned the station in the mid-1980s, right down to the exact model of a portable TV set seen in a period photograph.

Being out there is an astonishing experience. I’ve been there many times over years, and it never fails to be inspiring. You can read about it in Dave Gendell’s book, “Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse: A Chesapeake Bay Icon,” published in 2020 and available on Amazon, or you can go out there yourself.

The Lighthouse Society offers docent-led tours each Saturday between now and mid-October. Tours begin at 9 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. each day. They want you to be aware that the tour is considered an “adventure tour” involving vertical steps and ladders that can be strenuous to climb.

“Your health and safety are of paramount concern,” the website advises. “Please be sure you are physically capable of such activity before booking the tour.”

There are no toilet facilities available on the boat or at the lighthouse. And no, you can’t use the outhouse hanging over one side of the cottage.

The tour takes about two hours including a 30-minute boat ride to the lighthouse, a docent-led tour of the interior and a 30-minute boat ride back to the dock. Tours depart from the docks at the Annapolis Maritime Museum located at 723 2nd St., Annapolis, MD 21403. Tickets are $85 per person. Reservations are required. See https://thomaspointshoallighthouse.org/tours.