On an average Saturday morning, Tiffany Danse and Tyler Waterson’s to-do list looks something like this: Brew coffee. Bake fresh blueberry muffins. Cook and serve hot breakfast for 10. Give historical tour and foghorn demonstration. Clean up breakfast dishes and kitchen. Reset dining room. Clean the inn. Start prepping four-course dinner for 10 more people. Run boat service to the mainland. Make beds. Run boat service to the mainland again.

By that point, the sun is high and the wind building. Seagulls hover, sending occasional missiles of refuse plummeting. Harbor seal pups bask on nearby rocks like fat gray sausages, and the water of San Pablo Bay glistens a deep teal around East Brother, a ¾-acre island 1,000 feet from the coast of Richmond.

The view stretches past the Tinkertoy trussing of the Richmond Bridge and the Bay Bridge behind it, all the way to San Francisco’s cluttered skyline in the distance. But Danse and Waterson are too busy to admire it.

It’s noon, and they still have about 10 hours of work to go.

On May 1, Danse, 34, and Waterson, 33, took over as the new innkeepers of the East Brother Light Station Bed & Breakfast, “a one-of-a-kind Bay Area getaway” in an 1873 Victorian lighthouse on a speck of an island in San Pablo Bay. In moving to East Brother, the couple have joined a lineage of resident lightkeepers and innkeepers that stretches back nearly 150 years. They’ve also entered the ranks of a decidedly contemporary demographic: recipients of the viral job.

In January, news broke about an unusual job opening in the Bay Area. Perks included free housing, access to an island and almost complete autonomy. Challenges included running a historic “dinner, bed and breakfast” as the sole employees.

“Dream job? Get paid $130,000 to live on this island in the middle of the bay,” one headline read.

“For some reason it just went viral,” says Tom Butt, mayor of Richmond and president of East Brother Light Station Inc., the nonprofit that manages the inn.

The story got picked up by Travel + Leisure, Thrillist and Lonely Planet. Eventually international media started covering it as well.

“It went nuts worldwide. It was on TV all over the world. People were calling me from Bulgaria, Russia, China,” Butt says.

Thousands of inquiries and applications poured in. Some innkeeper hopefuls included sweet personal touches like photos or recipes, but most lacked one crucial qualification: a valid U.S. Coast Guard license needed to captain the Lucretia E., the small boat that ferries guests to and from the island.

Still, the media attention netted a massive uptick in serious candidates. The last time the inn needed new keepers about two and a half years ago, Butt says they had seven qualified applicants. This time there were 60.

Among them were Danse and Waterson.

The couple had been living on Waterson’s 32-foot sailboat in Napa, Danse doing short-term contracts as an occupational therapist, Waterson working as a freelance boat captain. He had the requisite Coast Guard license; she had hospitality experience. The last time the job opened up, they missed the application window. This time, they jumped.

“It was everything we were looking for,” says Danse. They envisioned it as a break from the grind of the medical industry and freelance gigs, a position near the city but isolated from it, a chance to work together and live in a place rooted deep in local history. Maybe even an opportunity to save some money and pay down student loans.

When Butt called to offer the couple the “dream job,” they were in the car. “We were whooping and hollering,” Waterson remembers.

They wrapped up other work and spent a couple weeks shadowing the outgoing innkeepers, Che Rodgers and Jillian Meeker. Then on May 1, the inn was theirs.

Sitting outside the lighthouse on a sunny July morning, just two-and-a-half months into their two-year commitment, the pair smile at the memory of that victorious moment. It feels simultaneously like they’ve already been on East Brother a long time and like the past 10 weeks have flown by, landing them here — exhausted, proud and focused on the months ahead.

“It’s important to remember how much we wanted this,” Danse says.

East Brother isn’t so much an island in the stock photo sense — sloping sand and gently lapping waves — as it is a rocky mound that rises stubbornly out of San Pablo Bay, topped with a trio of historic buildings, a rain catchwater system, a redwood water tank and three trees that seem to be surviving despite their environment rather than because of it. A white picket fence traces the perimeter, giving the whole scene an odd, vintage suburbia vibe.

Three hundred feet to the west is West Brother, a low rocky isle whitewashed with bird poop where the harbor seals like to hang. One thousand feet to the east is Point San Pablo, a peninsula that juts into the San Pablo Strait, where the San Francisco and San Pablo bays meet.

The lighthouse was built in 1873 in the aesthetic of the day: a grand Victorian-style home for the keepers and their families with scalloped siding, carved wooden trim and the light’s square tower rising in the middle. Early keepers lit a flame fueled by pig lard and whale oil. Today, the tower houses a somewhat underwhelming LED that flashes at five-second intervals.

Standing on East Brother, the island’s history is inescapable. It seems to emanate from the main house where longtime lightkeeper John O. Stenmark raised four kids, the foghorn building still packed with vintage equipment, the former schoolhouse and teacher’s quarters where innkeepers now live.

“To feel like we were part of such a long history of people taking care of that place — and there were so many things that could have happened to make it not around — it was really special,” says Che Rodgers, a former innkeeper who left the island in April.

In fact, the lighthouse was almost lost to progress years ago. In the late 1960s, the Coast Guard planned to raze the buildings and erect a simple tower with an automated beacon in their place. A group of locals intervened, campaigning to get the East Brother Light Station added to the National Register of Historic Places, and then — under the direction of a self-described “young and foolish” Tom Butt, who’s also an architect — restoring it to its former glory. In 1980, the East Brother Light Station Bed & Breakfast opened to the public.

Open year-round from Thursday to Sunday with day visits available on summer Saturdays, the inn works as a revenue share between the innkeepers and the nonprofit that leases the property from the Coast Guard. The organization takes a portion of the income for maintenance and capital improvements. The rest goes to the innkeepers for guest food and wine, basic supplies and laundry service. Whatever’s left over is the innkeepers’ pay.

“It’s like running a business,” Waterson says. “If you have a bad month, there’s no guaranteed salary.”

Last year saw record visitation, and this year is already on pace to easily surpass it. June was a record month. Then so was July. At full capacity, the bed and breakfast can accommodate 40 guests each week.

But it’s not for everyone. There’s no wi-fi or TV, and guests still reach the inn by boat, though now it’s a five-minute trip from the Point San Pablo Harbor instead of a 2-mile row from San Quentin. They climb a metal ladder from the boat to the elevated dock (minimal luggage recommended), are encouraged to forgo showers (the island’s pipes are fed by collected rainwater) and sleep in the former keepers’ quarters, decorated with mismatched antiques and a robust collection of lighthouse art.

A photo in the upstairs parlor from Stenmark’s tenure depicts a crowd of partygoers spilling out from the main house’s porches and balconies in the year 1900. The women wear high white collars and long skirts; the men wear swooping mustaches and dark jackets. No one is smiling, but someone has a banjo.

“I have a feeling that in the ’20s they were probably making gin in the bathtub here,” Danse laughs.

Included in the room rate, which runs $345 to $425, are the boat transfers, Champagne and hors d’oeuvres upon arrival, a four-course dinner, hot breakfast in the morning and a historical tour and demonstration of the 1934 diesel foghorn — three powerful blasts that sound like giant, bassy farts.

Danse and Waterson provide all of it. “We are the reception desk. We run the gift shop. We make the beds,” Danse says. “We cook the meals. Tyler is your captain and local history guide.”

They knew the deal when they applied for the job, but that doesn’t change the 6 a.m. baking sessions, the 10 p.m. dishes, the endless seagull poop or the occasional evening when a communal meal needs to satisfy the dietary requirements of vegan, gluten free and lactose intolerant guests.

Waterson estimates they’re working 80-90 hours a week, a schedule softened by encouraging words from appreciative visitors, the view over the water from this strange, special island and the rare quiet day when they can pull out their lawn chairs and spend a few minutes alone taking it all in.

“It so becomes your world,” says former innkeeper Jillian Meeker, “which is lovely, but also difficult.”

A few months into the job, Danse and Waterson have hit their stride. They’ve got crowd-pleasing recipes like maple-balsamic pork and the week’s menu mapped out well in advance. They’ve learned to make ice creams, sorbets and stocks on their so-called off days, when they only end up working an 8-hour shift instead of the 16 or so when guests are around. They’ve gotten into the habit of cleaning during dinner so they don’t have to wash dishes until midnight, and they set the table for breakfast the night before so there’s one less thing to do before everyone wakes up.

They’ve made connections to local suppliers like Paso Robles’ Field Recordings winery and Richmond’s Catahoula Coffee, which makes a Foghorn Blend on sale in the gift shop. They’ve turned chores into entertainment, like “no-nonsense bed-making,” which involves both of them and plenty of nonsense. They’ve gotten to know the local wildlife — the baby sparrows living in a planter, the harbor porpoises that sometimes swim by — and the history, how Stenmark rowed across the bay to retrieve a doctor for his wife’s deliveries, and how Richmond resident Walter Fanning helped save East Brother a half-century after his grandfather tended the light.

“Technically, we made more money doing what we did before, but to have this experience, I couldn’t imagine not taking this job,” Danse says.

On clear nights, when the kitchen is clean and the guests have gone to bed, sometimes she and Waterson spend a few minutes staring out at the San Francisco skyline. “The outline, twinkle lights and then you catch a shooting star,” she says. “You can feel the space more out here. When you’re in the middle of the city, everything feels a bit tighter and more constricted, but out here it feels more spacious, which is ironic because you’re on a three-quarter acre rock.”

In those moments, in the tiny cracks in a harried schedule, they take a deep breath and remember how lucky they are to be here. And the dream job does, for a second, feel like a dream.

Sarah Feldberg is the assistant features editor at The Chronicle. Email: sarah.feldberg@sfchronicle.com.