Michigan lighthouse launches messages in bottles offering free stays

Ben Hooper
·1 min read
2
UPI
The White Shoal Light, the tallest lighthouse on Lake Michigan, announced a contest featuring four messages in bottles thrown into the Great Lakes. Each bottle contains a different offer for a free stay at the historic lighthouse. Photo courtesy of the White Shoal Light Historical Preservation Society

Sept. 22 (UPI) -- The caretakers of a historic Michigan lighthouse are offering free stays at the landmark in an unusual contest involving messages in bottles tossed into the Great Lakes.

The White Shoal Light Historical Preservation Society announced the "message in a bottle contest" as part of the lighthouse's 113th anniversary celebrations.

The offshore lighthouse, located about 20 miles west of the Mackinac Bridge in Lake Michigan, is the tallest lighthouse on the Great Lakes.

Each of the four messages in bottles, which were dropped into the Mackinac Straits, contains a message from one of four descendants of longtime lightkeeper George Keller. The messages feature various offers for a free stay for one, two or up to five people.

The message in a bottle contest pays tribute to the Armistice Day Blizzard of November 1940, in which Keller and a colleague threw a message in a bottle into the water in case they did not survive the storm.

The men survived the storm, and their message was found a few weeks later by fisherman near Gros Cap, Mich.

"We made the connection with bringing these four family members together that it would be really cool to commemorate that story," Jill Ore, head lighthouse keeper for White Shoal, told MLive.