Half a Million For What?
By Sue Clark on Mar 6, 2009 in The Light Side 
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In a surprisingly active bidding war, the Frying Pan Shoals Light Tower recently sold for $515,000 dollars. That’s more than half a million big ones. And what did the winning bidder get? A decrepit tower out in the middle of nowhere. Okay, so it’s surrounded by water, as it’s 35 miles out to sea.
The tower is located 35 miles off the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.
The new owners are planning to make their new home a Dive Charter business and Fisheries Research station. Shipwrecks Inc. of South Carolina was the high bidder for the tower, which includes 5,000 square feet of living space and has its own helipad.
Lee Spence, one of the new owners, said in a story at the Star News Online, their first efforts will be to restore the tower and to put a hyperbaric chamber on it. The chamber would be kept on emergency standby to treat decompression-related problems divers may encounter diving on the area’s many historic shipwrecks, he said.
One of the other bidders, local sports fisherman Rube McMullan, wanted the property as a fishing pier. However, he and his partner Ocean Isle Fishing Center realized the folly of the purchase at that price and dropped out.
Frying Pan Shoals Light Tower has been out of service for about seven years, and was actually put up for auction last October, 2008. Shortly after going on the block, the sale was suspended with no reason given, and after a few weeks, Lighthouse News quit checking. It appears to have gone back on the market at the end of January, when the bidding war started.
I think this is a new record for the GSA’s lighthouse auctions. And yet I still can’t see anyone buying this for any amount of money. I guess the only good thing is they won’t have to ask permission from State Historical Preservation Offices to do any remodeling. They’ll only have to deal with permission from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Photo courtesy of the GSA Auction site, where it was made available by Wilmington Diving.
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1 Comment(s)
By Gary on Aug 26, 2010 (1 weeks ago) | Reply
Frying Pan Shoals Light Tower was purchased in May 2010 by Richard Neal of Mint Hill, NC for $85,000. He’s going to turn into a Bed & Breakfast.
www.wral.com/news/news_briefs/story/8192611/