1/10/2024 0 Comments Frying pan towerWho knows, maybe I'll find a decommissioned oil rig in the Gulf and turn it into a franchise. "Owning it has been the most fun I've had in my entire life, and I'll leave with a million stories to tell. "It's truly a place to ignore the world, but I'm just ready to let go," Neal says. He's nearing 60 now and believes it's time for someone younger to step in. His prices are robust prices: $598 per person for a three-day stay, or $1,295 if you prefer to take a helicopter to the tower rather than a boat. Neal says he's proven everything he set out to prove, including the fact such a crazy project could work. The waves are as wide as the tower, but it was built so well, you don't move. "The ocean goes from small waves to giant hills of water, and the color of the water turns into the most amazing aqua sherbert, because it's frothed up with air. "It's just the wind and the rain and an occasional flying fish," says Neal. On at least three occasions, Neal says he's been on the tower during hurricanes, including when the eye passed directly over the tower as he sat there. He loves the excitement of the tower, and business has been great, thanks to people who want a unique, if not strange, bed-and-breakfast experience. Neal says his risk paid off in countless ways. Then GPS navigation made the tower obsolete. The Coast Guard staffed it until 1979, when the beacon was automated. It was built in 1964 at a cost of $2 million to warn passing ships of the shallow Frying Pan Shoals. Neal says his mission was to turn it into an inn while keeping the structure largely intact as a monument to 1960s construction ingenuity. However, the Coast Guard thought that was a little low, so they negotiated a price of $85,000, which Neal thought was more than fair.Īt that point, an Oklahoma native who had been on the ocean only once before became the official owner of a rust-covered light house that towered 140 feet above the Atlantic.
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