BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer
Lighthouse admirers once again will have a chance to visit 11 of these sentinels overlooking the sea in the 2004 New Jersey Lighthouse Challenge Oct. 16 and 17.
This is the fifth year that the New Jersey Lighthouse Society has held the challenge, the aim of which is to gather a baseball-size card from each of the 11 lighthouses on the tour as a souvenir of the journey.
Tom Laverty, president of the New Jersey Lighthouse Society and curator of the Twin Lights lighthouse in Highlands, said about 1,200 persons completed visits to all 11 lighthouses during last year’s tour, a new record.
“We guestimate about 20,000 people visited one or more of the lighthouses over the weekend,” he added, which would be another record.
Several of the lighthouses that will be on the challenge tour are not regularly open during the rest of the year, or are open only on a limited basis.
“So having them open on the challenge weekend is really special,” he said.
Of all of the lighthouses along the ocean from Sandy Hook to Cape May and up the Delaware River to Tinicum across from Philadelphia, the Sandy Hook and Twin Lights lighthouses seem to be the most visited because they are right next to each other, according to Laverty.
“But Cape May, Absecon (outside Atlantic City) and Barnegat also get very high visitations,” he said.
Twin Lights, operated by the state, is open year around from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Sandy Hook lighthouse, which is staffed by the Lighthouse Society, is open from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday from the first week in April until the second week in December.
The other lighthouses on the tour are Sea Girt, Tucker’s Island, Hereford Inlet, East Point and Finn’s Point.
New Jersey has a total of 20 lighthouses on land and water.
Asked his favorite of the lighthouses on the tour, Laverty said he enjoys them all.
“I can’t say that any of them are not fascinating,” he said. “So I would have a hard time picking one.”
“But, yes,” he acknowledged when pressed, “I have a certain affection for this one” — referring to Twin Lights where he works.
Laverty said lighthouses mean different things for different people. He believes a lot of the fascination is born of nostalgia for a way of life that doesn’t exist any more. He noted that water transportation was the biggest way of traveling in the 18th and 19th centuries and said lighthouses gave people a feeling of safety and assuredness when they were out at sea and saw them.
“That was handed down from generation to generation,” he said. “They were sentinels of safety and solitude.”
“We get a lot of very excited and positive comments back from people,” he said. “People from out of state say they didn’t know New Jersey lighthouses were so beautiful. Likewise, they point out how beautiful New Jersey’s coastline is.”