Once a light station that marked the shoals off the coast of Southport, North Carolina, for ships, the two-story Frying Pan Shoals Light Station now houses a bed-and-breakfast perched on a platform 32 miles off the coast of Cape Fear.
But the equipment needed to operate each well is too heavy to put on a floating platform, so it has to be installed on the sea-bed and run and maintained by remote-controlled submarines.