Voyage to Frying Pan Tower: Restoring the missing pieces

FRYING PAN SHOALS, NC (WWAY) — Frying Pan Tower is filled with history, adventure, rust, and some missing pieces, but there is a man and dozens of volunteers working to fix that.

For more than a decade, Richard Neal has been protecting, preserving, and restoring Frying Pan Tower.

“I have a difficult time focusing on any one particular task, so thank God there’s 50 different projects ongoing out here at once.. everything from repairing the railing, to trying to get the subsea structure or the supports underneath us or patching a tank so it holds the water, to painting one of the rooms,” Neal said. 

At any given moment, you may see Neal hanging or climbing to fix or adjust just about anything. 

“Richard is uniquely adapted to anything that is thrown at him,” Captain Scott Tinney said. 

The thing that impacts the tower and Neal the most is the salt water. There are areas of the tower that are roped off. There are parts of the tower that are coming off and there are pieces that are rusting away.

“If you come up to the tower at the water level, you’re going to see those pipes that are right about 12 feet, one of them is missing. And that is true. It is an area that is rotting away,” Neal said. 

While Neal knows what needs to be done and how to do it, he doesn’t expect anyone who wants to volunteer to know any of those things. 

“It’s so funny because people will contact me, ‘Oh I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to weld. I’m like, you don’t understand. I want this, you’re head and your heart.”

He just needs you to show up and he will teach you the rest.  People do show up from all over.

“I just remember a young British lady. She came over here. She left her family and her new baby and said, ‘I just feel drawn to the tower’. By the time she left, she was welding and we were actually using it up here and moving things around. She’s like, ‘I’m part of that tower.’ That’s so important to me,” Neal said. 

There are hundreds of people who are now part of the tower including Captain Scott Tinney. He drove WWAY’s team to the tower by boat. It is a drive he has been making since his brother discovered the tower needed help in 2016.

“My brother found it and wanted to bring a load out and knew I had a boat, so we did it and it’s gone from there,” Tinney said. 

Restoring, protecting, preserving, and volunteering do not just happen on the tower.

“I seem to be the fuel guy for some reason,” Tinney said. Yesterday, we carried batteries out. We’ve carried the refrigerator, the grill, just any number of things over the years.. generators back and forth. There’s always a need to have stuff out here of course. And the only way to get it here is in a boat.”  

Whether you’re a long time or a first time volunteer, it is easy to see that Neal is the head and the heart of the tower keeping its mission alive.

“The tower was really lucky when Richard won the bid, because I really don’t anybody could have pulled it off quite the way he has,” Tinney said. “He loves it. It’s just what he wants to do.”

Being a part of that mission will make you feel alive.

“This year it turns 60 and I think with what we’re doing and the kind of support we’re doing, it’ll probably make another at least 50. We’ll see,” Neal said.

Click here to learn more about volunteering for the non-profit that runs the tower.

We will have more on how you can win a trip to the tower later this week to help with restoration. Hannah Patrick will show you what it is like to stay overnight at the tower on Friday on WWAY News at 6.

Before that, Sydney Bouchelle will show us more on how the tower keeps boaters, divers, and others safe off our coast including a new rescue device. That is Thursday night at 6 when WWAY’s Voyage to Frying Pan Tower continues.