Would that island by the way be Sugar Island. The St Marys river between the upper and Canada is cold as ice. Dad had a friend that was the sheriff of Sugar Island many years ago. Dad and he would periodically run a still. No one to arrest them...But his black labs would spot dead heads out in the river, jump in and bring them back to shore..They were long enough and big enough around he ended up building one of his small docks from the dead heads floating in the St Mary's River...OOPs, reread your post, no light house on Sugar Island that I can remember but its been over 50 years since I was up there. The Finnish sauna he built was great, hot rocks and a dipper of water inside. He said the Finns would sauna and then roll in the snow....negged as a jay bird. They were all a little crazy...
I’m pretty sure without looking it up that it was Neebish Island.
I was stationed out of the Base at Sault Ste. Marie in the 1970’s for several years and I did maintenance on all of the lighthouses in the U.P. as well as Upper Lower peninsula. Lot’s and lot’s of miles put on the roads doing that. Snowmobile miles too and then there’s all of the time lugging those damn eighty pound batteries on a sledge suing snowshoes on the frozen river.
The batteries were for radar transponders for use in aids to navigation.
Oh yeah, I also pulled snowplow duty too. Nothing like plowing parking lots and entrance roads at four o’clock in the morning.