Owners explore opening part of the Frisco Pier for business this summer

By IRENE NOLAN

By IRENE NOLAN

If you have noticed a lot of activity in recent days around the Frisco Pier, it’s because the owners, Tod and Angie Gaskill, are working on fixing up the pier house and are hoping that they can open part of the structure for business this year.

This week, Angie Gaskill and members of her family have been cleaning up the pier house and stocking it with fishing tackle, gift and souvenir items, and cold drinks and snacks.

The Frisco Pier, which was built in 1962, has been battered by hurricanes and northeasters over the years and especially since the Gaskills bought it shortly after Hurricane Isabel in 2003.  The continued assault by the ocean has taken its toll, and the end of the pier is buckled and in precarious shape.

The pier was not open last year at all, much to the disappointment of local and visiting anglers and Frisco businesses.

This week the pier was barricaded not too far from the front door, less than halfway down the length of the structure. It is this part that the Gaskills think is safe enough to open for business  to anglers and sightseers before summer, and there is still enough ocean under the short stretch to wet a line and catch a fish.

Angie Gaskill said this week that she has been fielding phone calls but the pier is not open until she and her husband finalize their arrangements with the National Park Service.

The Gaskills own the pier house and pier, but the Park Service owns the beach on which the pier house sits and the parking lot.  The couple operates the pier under a concession contract with the park.

“We are having discussions with the owners about the long-term use of the pier,” Mike Murray, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, said in a telephone interview this week.

Murray said that an engineering firm that has handled numerous contracts through the NPS Southeastern Regional office in Atlanta, including work on the renovation of the Outer Banks Group headquarters on Roanoke Island and the Bodie Island Lighthouse, has recently completed a study of the structural integrity of the pier.

Park officials have not received a report yet on the study, but Murray said it will help the seashore determine if it is safe for the public to be on “part of the pier, none of the pier, or all of the pier.”

“Everyone’s common goal is to restore the pier so it is fully functional,” Murray added.

Tod Gaskill said in an interview published on The Island Free Press last summer that he and his wife put $100,000 into the pier to repair the damage from Isabel, and had put another $50,000 into the structure each year since then.

He said his initial work to shore up the pier was complicated by the fact that he received a shipment of bad pilings, which should have lasted at least 20 years and have not lasted five.

He estimated last summer that at least 100 of the 130 pilings shoring up the pier need to be replaced.

“In my own eyes, it will take $150,000 to $200,000 to fix it,” for the long-term, he said then.

And since then, the pier was further damaged by back-to-back northeasters last November and a steady parade of storms in January and February.

Seashore officials met with the Gaskills last summer to talk about what funding might be available to help restore the pier.

“We had a conversation with Tod and his wife Angie, trying to work through the problem,” Murray said in an interview last summer.  “We’re certainly interested in opening it and keeping it open to the public.”

However, he said, finding funding sources from the Park Service or other public agencies is problematic since the pier is privately owned.

Tod Gaskill, who also owns Top Dollar Construction and Angelo’s restaurant on Hatteras with his wife, has been working in Galveston, Tex., for the past several years, repairing damage from Hurricane Ike.

But, he said last year that’s not the reason he has not addressed the problems with the pier.

He said he did not spend the $50,000 to $75,000 he estimated it would take to open the pier last year because of the economy.

“I want to see it cleaned up and functioning for the locals and the visitors,” Gaskill said last summer. “I grew up on the island in the seafood business….It’s a landmark here.”

Gaskill added that the pier has not been a big moneymaker.

“I didn’t buy this thing to make money,” he said.

He added he’s made a modest profit, but “it’s not a big prospering business,” and it’s not made enough to cover the money he has had to put into repairing it.

Some word on whether or not the Frisco Pier will reopen for business for the season should be coming soon, both the Gaskills and Murray said.

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