- I'm Samir Patel,
deputy editor of Atlas Obscura,
and I'm going magnet fishing.
I heard about magnet fishing
from...
might've been Reddit.
There is a
subreddit for it.
So, I saw these pictures
of these people in the U.K.,
who were evidently
near some kind of training center
for World War II or something like that,
and pulled dozens of rifles
out of a pond.
- It's a pipe.
No!
No! Pipe. - No! It's a gun.
It's a rifle or shotgun.
- Magnet fishing is...
you take a powerful
rare-earth magnet and you tie a rope to it,
and you chuck it in the water.
- It's like fishing, but with a magnet.
- Oh, my god!
- Whoa!
Oh! That's magnetic.
Dude, it's a go-kart.
- Alright,
we've got:
gloves,
rope,
and this:
Brute Magnetics'
round neodymium magnet with eye bolt.
It's magnetic.
There's the "Don't get your hand
caught between two of them."
And this means,
I'm assuming, "Don't get near it
if you have a pacemaker."
Why don't we try it
over here on the edge.
So, we're not putting it
flush on there.
Okay, that I can't do.
That is a strong magnet.
Well, this magnet is rated for 500 pounds.
So, I think you need something
that's rated this strong
even to pick up little stuff that's in the water,
'cause it's gonna have all kinds of gunk and stuff on it.
We should take this outside
and see what we can do with it.
Hey,
I got a bobby pin.
Successful magnet fishing,
first try,
in the park.
Anything right here?
I'm trying to cover
as wide a space as I can.
- What would be the best thing you could hope to find?
- A Citi Bike,
like, a ride-share bike.
Like, if you could pull up
one of those up out of the water,
I feel like
that would be a public service.
There's something on this.
This is a piece of metal or something.
I'll be happy to find anything
that is remotely sort of interesting or puzzling,
or looks a little old.
This appears to be part of a lock.
It's corroded or clipped at the top
and the spring's sticking out of it.
- I don't want to fall in.
I'm actually slipping.
Man, look at the bubbles come.
- We are going to
Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx,
where they have a lake
that's adjacent to a golf course.
It's been there for a long, long time.
They've given us a research permit,
which I think is really interesting
because it suggests, like, they're actually
kind of curious about what this would find,
or what, you know, is down under the murky depths,
it's like eight feet deep, of Van Cortlandt Lake.
So, if we do find anything interesting,
actually,
regardless of what we find,
we are under some obligation to
file a report with the Parks Department.
- Look at that.
We've got a little donut and a nail.
You can't go anywhere
without finding some nails.
- So Van Cortlandt Lake,
the surface of it
is
just...
it's black.
Like, it looks...
it's really dark.
It's sort of like, a...
Like, a kind of swampy,
kind of muddy, body of water.
So, anything
that gets thrown into Van Cortlandt Lake
is probably never going to come out again.
I've spent a long time
writing about archaeology over the years,
especially shipwrecks and underwater stuff.
I've dived on wrecks and done a lot of stuff.
So, anything that's under the water
and hidden that way is interesting and exciting to me.
Caught something.
Not seeing anything that looks metal yet.
But, let's try it this way.
Alright, here we go.
There's a Stella bottle cap.
First human artifact
appears to have emerged.
We got a nail here, just a bent nail.
Gotta be careful
when I pull this stuff off.
That's a regular hook...
a still-sharp one.
Cardinal rule of magnet fishing,
as told to us by a YouTube magnet fisher:
Make sure you tie your rope off.
I got something.
Clearly a piece of a construction waste, rebar.
This is why we wear gloves and get tetanus shots.
- A lot of water... - Yeah, Oh, my God! Guys.
- So what do you like about this?
- What I like about it
is it's scratching every itch.
It's like fishing.
So,
you keep doing
the repetitive thing until you find something.
And certainly, finding something was exciting.
I got an earring.
I'm guessing it's not
a real diamond.
Now, normally, when I see
people doing this online,
they are just dropping it straight down,
which we can do here.
But, you know,
actually, it's picking up a lot of stuff
as we're dragging it across the bottom.
There's something very big on the end of this.
I can see billows of sediment coming up.
Holy (beep)!
It's a bike!
(laughing)
Gonna look at it.
The back tire is there,
but all the spokes are rusted out.
I think we have to talk to the
people at the park about
the proper way to dispose of it.
I don't know how we're going to get rid of it.
Um,
I certainly don't want to throw it back.
It kinda stinks.
I'll tell you, it changes
the way you look at,
like, when you see a body of water,
you're gonna be curious about
what would be at the bottom
if you threw your magnet in it.
So, I could see why people get addicted to it,
for sure.