SANDY HOOK —Standing in the lantern room of the south tower of the Twin Lights lighthouse in Highlands on Saturday, Greg Fitzgerald gazed at the scenic view more than 200 feet below that includes Sandy Hook Bay.

“This is cool. I’ve never been all the way up here,” declared the Warren Township resident as he snapped off some photographs on his camera.

That’s quite a statement for someone who’s visited more than 400 lighthouses around the world and climbed 75 of them, but that’s also the magic organizers hope to create every year during the Lighthouse Challenge of New Jersey.

During the two-day event, a legion of volunteers staff the 11 participating lighthouses, stations and museums from Sandy Hook to Cape May and around the Delaware Bay to drum up appreciation for a system of coastal protection that is now largely obsolete.

“Lighthouses are something of the past. What we’re trying to do is keep them in the minds of the general public…let them see what’s going on, stimulate their interest,” said Alan Jacobson of Monroe, a volunteer at the Sandy Hook Lighthouse.

Fitzgerald, 24, said he’s been inside the Sandy Hook Lighthouse about six times and he always finds some tidbit of new information about it.

He said his love of lighthouses started on a family vacation when he was 9. Since then, he’s seen lighthouses in Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, Bahamas, the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway.

He’s seen all the lighthouses in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and North Carolina and nearly all of them in Massachusetts, New York and Maine.

He said he and his friends, as part of a lighthouse touring club, even chartered a plane to see lighthouses from New York to Vermont.

Fitzgerald is proud that his home state can boast that Sandy Hook has the oldest working lighthouse in the country.

Constructed in 1764, the Sandy Hook Lighthouse dates back to America’s colonial days and was considered a strategic hold for colonists as well as British soldiers looking to control what was coming into and out of New York Harbor. When it fell into enemy possession and the British fighters sought to use it to signal their own ships, colonists resorted to firing cannon balls at the tower to try to extinguish the light, said historian Bill Dunn.

During World War II, lighthouses were transferred to the control of the U.S. Coast Guard in recognition of their importance to national security, Dunn said. Sandy Hook Lighthouse’s white exterior was painted camouflage and its light was doused to keep it from aiding the enemy, he said.

Making Sandy Hook their first stop, Kelly and Wayne Sheranko brought their three young sons, Brett, 7; Derek, 5; and Curtis, 3; from Maryland to participate in the challenge.

“We’ve been planning this since April,” Kelly Sheranko said.

But after climbing partway to the first landing of the 104 steps, the two younger boys chickened out.

Just five miles away across Sandy Hook Bay stands Twin Lights, built in 1862 on a 200-foot-high bluff – the only lighthouse in the country to have twin towers, historians said. Keeping with the regulation that no two lighthouses could be alike, planners figured double towers would help mariners distinguish it from the nearby Sandy Hook Lighthouse, Dunn said.

Constructed to replace two deteriorating free-standing towers known as Navesink Light Station, the sandstone and brick structure, which resembles a castle, incorporates two stone towers – one octagonal and square – connected by the keeper’s quarters and work space.

Volunteer Patrick Kearns said no one knows definitively why the towers don’t match. He likes the theory that the architect, a chess aficionado, designed one to resemble the king and one to resemble the queen of a chess set.

But Peggi Carlson, senior historian for the Twin Lights Historic Site, said it’s more likely that the Lighthouse Board, which oversaw the inspection and construction of lighthouses, designed it in the style that was popular at the time.

It’s probably no coincidence, she said, that Twin Lights and the Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, D.C., have strikingly similar designs. After all, two of the Lighthouse Board members also sat on the board of regents of the Smithsonian, she said.

Staffing shortages prevent the south tower from opening to the public as often as the north tower, Carlson said. But when the south tower is open, visitors can go to the very top to the lantern room – the room that once held the light.

Twin Lights, which is now part of the state park system, is also the site where Fresnel lenses – lenses that revolutionized how bright and how far light could be projected – were first tested in the United States, Fitzgerald said.

He said he likes Twin Lights for the grandeur of its architecture, something that's never been seen again in a lighthouse.



"It's just so totally overdone. This is something that would never get built today – the kind of architectural detail that went into this building," Fitzgerald said

His third and last stop of the day was the Sea Girt Lighthouse, the only lighthouse on the East Coast that also doubled as the keeper's quarters.

Keepers coveted these assignments because the live-in lighthouses were generally located within towns rather than in isolated locations, they had indoor plumbing and they had fewer steps to climb to ge to the lantern room, Fitzgerald said.

“These were very, very cushy jobs,” he said.

Alisa Aulito went on a road trip from Long Island with her boyfriend, Drew Conrad, her two sisters Christina and April Aulito, her 6-year-old nephew Landon Aulito and her 12-year-old toy poodle Bella.

Wearing matching white caps that said Griswold’s Lighthouse Vacation, they planned to hit seven lighthouses on Saturday before finishing in Absecon and staying overnight in Wildwood.

“We love lighthouses,” Alisa Aulito said. “They’re all different. They all have a different story about them.”

By noon, more than 400 people had gone through the Sea Girt Lighthouse, including visitors from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Texas, Florida, Connecticut, New York and even Germany, said former trustee Conrad Yauch, now a volunteer.

The lighthouses don’t open their doors in the challenge for the money the tourists bring., he said. Although the challenge raises money for the lighthouses – visitors are encouraged to leave donations and buy memorabilia – it’s not a big money-maker, Yauch said.

“It’s fun and it gets people interested in lighthouses,” he said. “That’s what we get from it.”

MaryAnn Spoto may be reached at mspoto@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaryAnnSpoto. Find NJ.com on Facebook.