Hello everyone,
I just wanted to share a bit about my journey to visit Coral Castle. I had read about Giantkiller having an opportunity, some time ago, and I have wanted to visit myself, and sleuth around and see what I see.
To start with, the actual land area covered by Coral Castle was much smaller then I had always pictured, and it is surrounded completely by suburbia, shopping centers, gas stations, etc. Also a bit of a shock, as I always assumed that it was somewhere off by itself.
I can say that Ed lived a very simple life. The "tower" where he lived was very small and unassuming but a masterpiece of block coral. Very cool inside of it, even in the heat of the day. Ed's original bed was removed and an unauthentic one put in it's place. That made me a bit sad.
The Coral Castle, it's contents and "quarry" were nothing short of amazing. But this man, Ed, had a work ethic that was very impressive. He worked from 9am to 4pm for himself, on his Castle, day in and day out, for many, many years. This helped to put things into perspective for me as I gazed in awe at the works surrounding me. He did not just spend 6 days floating in the rocks to place and then rest on the seventh. He was a master builder, and a master of balance and scale.
Of course there were many mysteries. Rocks that were massive, with no chain marks but a few with wire marks, as if the wire had burned itself into the rock making a forever mold of it's own outline. Also many of the massive blocks of coral, had nails of all different sizes, either driven or melted into the Coral. We were told that the coral is very brittle, and one could never hammer such huge nails into it and have them hold. One lady suggested they were mortered in, but I saw no such sign of that. Also, another facinating bit of information was that the coral itself lies but 6 inches beneath the top soil in this spot, and as one looked just outside of the Castle wall, one could see the massive missing blocks of Coral that had been taken from their resting place. To say that the cuts were symetrical would again be a huge understatement. Square and massive. One can see the spots where his tools grabbed at the rocks.
One person I met, knew Ed and had worked for him, as a youth. They talked about how Ed had such a great sense of humor. They told how determined they were to learn his secret and spent much time studying and learning about magnetic current. One day, they asked Ed about some numbers etched into the door frame of his castle, and Ed replied that those numbers were the secret to his process. This person spent many weeks trying to figure out these numbers until one day Ed explained that those numbers were from his immigration card, when he came to the U.S. to live. They both had a good laugh at that.
Following are pictures I took myself. I am of course well aware that there are many pictures on the web, but anywho, I hope you enjoy these....
Cheers,
Bruce
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Beautiful pictures Bruce!
Do you know perhaps if something is put in a bottle? (Water, oil ...)
Quote from: Shokac on July 03, 2011, 03:46:53 AM
Beautiful pictures Bruce!
Do you know perhaps if something is put in a bottle? (Water, oil ...)
Hi Shokac,
Thank you!
As for the bottles, I honestly can't remember what specific things they said Ed kept in them. Water and Oil would be a fair guess for some of them. Ed was a "scrapper" and used many automotive parts of his day as salvage and turned them into useful items.
Cheers,
Bruce
Great pictures.. I wonder if Ed's bed floated as well, looks very uncomfortable. The metal spikes in the coral remind me of the Hutchison effect.
Thanks for the pics. I didn't know the place had been surrounded by suburbia like that. Nice to see the close-up and interior details too. Thanks.
About the blurriness of the photo's. When getting physically close to a subject you have to make sure you don't zoom in using the camera's zoom lens, but keep the lens at it's widest setting in order to stay in focus. Depending on the camera, you can put the lens as close as is physically possible to the subject when zoomed out as wide as possible, (though with some camera's you may still be limited to being no closer than a foot or so.) But when zooming in to any degree you are usually limited to staying several feet from the subject you're zooming in on. This minimum distance between the lens and subject is known as the 'minimal focal distance' and is often written in the camera's manual, or even on the lens itself. Of course, maybe you knew all that and there's some other reason for the lack of focus, in that case, I don't know either.