- Morning, guys.
Gentlemen.
NARRATOR: Rick Lagina joins Craig Tester
and other members of the Oak Island team
at the Money Pit site.
Now that drilling has begun at a second location,
they are hopeful they will soon reach
a mysterious 30-foot-wide void located
at a depth of some 170 feet and which was identified
earlier by seismic scanning.
Much talked about, 87.5.
I pulled out H8 from last year.
A very, you know, interesting and important hole,
and it spawned the large diameter caisson.
And today, we're very close with that one.
We're into open ground that hasn't
had any real information on it, you know, plus or minus
5 feet away from it.
We've got a really relatively virgin target very close
to what I think is the Money Pit.
This should be interesting.
You know, considering what came out of H8,
this should be a real hot zone for artifacts.
NARRATOR: Using a specialized sonic rig,
the Choice Drilling team will extract core samples of earth
and any objects contained within at intervals every 10 feet.
These samples will then be transferred
into a plastic sleeve so that they
can be carefully examined by hand for any important clues
or possible treasure.
Well, here we go.
What depth, Brennan?
160.
That's really gravelly, but it's mostly limestone.
You see that tan color?
That's limestone.
And this silt, there's, you know, organics in there.
What is that?
That's weird.
I think this is coconut fiber.
That's really interesting.
NARRATOR: At the Money Pit, while searching the spoils
of the exploratory borehole known as H7.5, Rick Lagina,
Craig Tester, and members of the Oak Island team have
just made an amazing discovery.
When you look at the historical records,
they did find, you know, what they believed
to be coconut fiber in the Money Pit
when they were excavating it.
So it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Exactly.
NARRATOR: Coconut fiber in the Money Pit, 160
feet deep below the surface?
But if so, how did it get there, and why?
In 1804, when the Money Pit was excavated by the Onslow
Company, searchers reported finding
a large amount of coconut fiber at a depth of 60 feet.
Given that the nearest coconut trees are located some
1,500 miles south of Nova Scotia,
they concluded that it had been used to make a kind of rope
that would enable depositors to lower something of great value
down into the shaft.
Could the discovery of coconut fiber
be an important indication that Rick, Marty, and the team
have finally located the site of the original Money Pit?
Cut.
Look, you can see that ax.
See that?
Yeah.
Somebody's hit these things with an ax.
You can see the bevel of the ax.
This is interesting.
And what are we at again from the top here, 1--
171.
NARRATOR: Ax-cut wood found approximately 170 feet deep
underground and nearly the same depth where
recent seismic scanning revealed a mysterious
30-foot-wide chamber?
Could the Oak Island team have just
discovered solid evidence of the legendary Chappell vault?
Well, we are going to want to bag
and tag these pieces of wood in through here.
There's quite a bit of limestone-rich material,
the matrix.
There's also a very large rounded clasps.
We've never seen anything like that.
And this minced-up stuff here?
That's really interesting.
This has all just collected somehow in, like--
in the corner of something or in a crevice of something,
you know?
Otherwise, this would be mixed.
You know, I wish I could make a very firm statement whenever we
drill that, OK, we're in this structure,
or we're in this shaft, or we're in this wall.
But we don't know the underground.
That has been proven to us over and over and over again.
At this point, we have a lot of data, the coring samples
that we've brought up, and from that
maybe then get an understanding of how
these wood structures align.
That's my hope.
But how we pursue it, I don't know as of yet.
You have to have faith that what you're doing is right.
I mean, like all the searchers before, I mean,
it was always the next day, the next hole,
the next 10 feet of the shaft.
If you don't believe that, then it's time to go home.
When it gets tough, I go back to Bobby Restall's journal.
We made two inches today, and they were happy.
Yeah.
Yeah, we came up dry, but we tried.
Yeah.
And we didn't quit, and neither did they.
Nope.