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Discover a world of natural wonders and thrilling experiences on Frying Pan Tower, located 32 miles off the coast of North Carolina and rises 135′ above the Atlantic Ocean.
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Frying Pan Tower™ is located 32 miles off the coast of North...
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Your Frying Pan Tower Adventure Includes: Outdoor...
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The Frying Pan Tower, a beacon of resilience rising from the...
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Frying Pan Tower™ is well equipped with proper safety...
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Frying Pan Tower™ Beverage Glass $ 16.00. CONTACT...
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The Frying Pan Tower™ is located 32 miles off the coast of...
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FPTower Inc., is a non-profit organization dedicated to the...
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- Graveyard of the Atlantic
- An eco-adventure like none other
- A safe haven
Once a beacon for ships navigating North Carolina’s treacherous coast, Frying Pan Tower has taken on a second life as a marine outpost and eco-lodge.
“Send him up!” a fisherman says into his radio as I sit precariously on the bow of his boat, bobbing in the cold swells of the Atlantic, more than 30 miles from shore. A wooden plank beneath me lurches like a swing, lifting me upward, off the boat, and far above the water, towards the entrance to an old U.S. Coast Guard light station where I’ll be staying for the weekend.
Suddenly, the hoist shudders and comes to a halt.
“Whoops, hang on,” Richard Neal calls out calmly from the tower’s deck. For a moment I’m stuck in midair, dangling 60 feet above the sea. “I haven’t dropped anyone—yet,” Neal says with a smile, only after he’s gotten the hoist working again a few minutes later and I’ve been safely brought into the tower’s entrance.
Frying Pan Tower was built by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1964 to light the way for ships navigating North Carolina’s treacherous coastline, famously nicknamed the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because it has seen so many shipwrecks and squalls. The tower marks the start of Frying Pan Shoals, a skillet-shaped stretch of dangerously shallow waters.
Seven of these so-called “Texas Tower” lighthouses, which look similar to offshore oil rigs, were built during the 20th century at strategic locations along the East Coast. They have not aged well. Most were first automated, and then decommissioned, left to rust in the dark until they were declared structurally unsound and eventually dismantled. Just three remain standing today: Diamond Shoals Light, off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras; Chesapeake Light, marking the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia; and Frying Pan Tower.
Frying Pan is the only one at least somewhat accessible to the public. In 2010, Neal bought the tower at auction from the U.S. government for $85,000, but he has since divested his ownership, and now runs a nonprofit tasked with its preservation and renewal.
Volunteers willing to help with restoration work can join Neal at Frying Pan. They must cover their own transportation costs—usually a few hundred dollars to hitch a bouncy, two-hour boat ride with fishermen (or more for an easy 20-minute helicopter flight). In exchange they receive free room and board.
“Depending on their skillset, they may be doing some electrical work, they might be doing some welding, they might be sweeping the floor or doing laundry,” Neal says. “Everybody that comes out here and has a heart to restore the tower gets to participate.”
Frying Pan exists completely off the grid, powered by solar panels (with a backup generator for heat and air conditioning). There are two modern bathrooms with several flushing toilets, large sinks, and hot-water showers, from which wastewater is deposited deep into the ocean. The eight bedrooms, each one named for a different North Carolina lighthouse, are far from fully renovated, but are comfortable and sparingly decorated with nautical pieces from the tower’s past—dusty life preservers, old maps, and analog weather instruments and radios.
(How to save a lighthouse? Sleep in one.)
The experience of visiting, however, is not for the faint of heart. The tower has been severely battered by the sea for more than half a century. Its massive metal pilings, drilled into the ocean floor, are covered with rust. The wraparound grated-steel platforms are loose in some areas, cordoned off with rope, and it‘s not hard to imagine an 80-foot fall to the water below. The tower was deemed structurally sound when Neal bought it 12 years ago, but it hasn’t had a proper inspection since. “We’ve had some engineers out and they think it’s still okay,” he says.
Safety and emergency response remain central to the tower’s mission in its second life. One evening, in the living room, I find Neal putting together a red-and-white beacon light that will shine atop the tower for the first time since he first bought it in 2010.
“We all have GPS,” Neal says, “but it will bring a level of reassurance for boaters to say, ‘There’s the tower. I see it.’”
Neal doesn’t currently live on the tower, but he has done so a few times in the past, including for a stretch in 2016, after he was laid off from his longtime job as a software salesman. “I was depressed,” he says. “So, I picked up a hammer and I got to work.”
He did not return to land for six months, relying on fishermen for food and supplies, and occasional visitors for company as he made repairs and installed new technology. Most of the time, though, he was alone. “Just staring at the stars and talking to the ocean,” Neal says, “and getting my head back on straight.”
Now Neal dedicates himself full-time to the restoration project. He opened the tower’s doors to volunteers—many of whom, a guest book on the coffee table shows, were drawn to the project for similarly personal reasons. “You see this thing out there in the middle of the ocean and you think, I can never get on there,” says Dirk Swart, a volunteer who has come on 13 work trips over the past year and a half. “And then you do, and you’re okay.”
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Frying Pan Shoals Light Station is a decommissioned Coast Guard lighthouse located near the end of the Frying Pan Shoals 32 miles (51 km) SE of Bald Head Island, North Carolina.
Dec 2, 2014 · Frying Pan Tower. Built to replace a permanently manned “lightship” on the edge of the treacherous “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” Frying Pan Tower was a unique lighthouse that was built like an...
