In February 2013, brothers Rick and Marty Lagina travel from Michigan to Oak Island, Nova Scotia, to launch the most extensive exploration of the island in over two hundred years. Rick first became fascinated by Oak Island at age 11 after reading about the mystery and sharing the story with his younger brother. Six years earlier, the Laginas purchased a controlling interest in the corporation that owns most of the island, spending thousands of hours researching and securing permits for a full-scale investigation. Joining them are Marty's long-time business partner Craig Tester, Craig's son Jack Begley, island resident Dave Blankenship, and veteran treasure hunter Dan Henskee, a retired postal worker who has spent decades studying the Oak Island mystery.
The team begins drilling in the Money Pit area, sifting through cuttings as the bit descends past 155 feet. At roughly 165 feet, fragments of pottery are recovered from the spoils. Rick and Marty had agreed that any man-made artifact datable to before 1800 would constitute proof that the Money Pit conceals something significant, but lab results on the pottery come back inconclusive. Anhydrite is identified in the cuttings, confirming the team has not yet reached bedrock.
Attention shifts to Borehole 10-X, a 235-foot shaft located just 180 feet from the Money Pit. Dan Blankenship dug the eight-foot-wide hole by hand in the 1970s, lining it with steel cut from old railroad tankers. At 90 feet one of the metal casings collapsed, nearly crushing Dan before his son David pulled him to safety. Dan eventually abandoned the shaft when funding ran out, but not before capturing video at the bottom that he believed showed wooden beams, antique tools, tunnels, what appeared to be treasure chests, and the remarkably preserved remains of a human body. The team lowers a Spectrum 90 high-definition robotic camera capable of 40x magnification down the flooded shaft. At the bottom they observe a strange vertical object that appears to extend into the ceiling of the cavern. Dan, now 90 years old, reviews the footage in the War Room and identifies what he believes is the top of a tunnel, consistent with what he observed three decades earlier. A connection between 10-X and the Money Pit has long been suspected: air pumped into one hole produces bubbles in the other, and both shafts share the unusual characteristic of salt water sitting on top of fresh water.
An airlift operation begins to pump sediment from the 10-X cavity, with a sediment tank collecting material and a discharge chute running to Smith's Cove. Sifting of the spoils by Jack Begley and Dan Henskee produces small pieces of wood that could be significant, given that oak planks found at ten-foot intervals during the original 1800s excavation were a hallmark of the Money Pit's construction. Among the debris, the team recovers a small piece of metal embedded inside a rock.
Rick, Marty, and Alex Lagina take a boat around the island to survey the coastline from the water for the first time. They pass the property of fellow treasure hunter Fred Nolan, whose contentious 48-year rivalry with Dan Blankenship is well known. In 1981, Nolan discovered five large cone-shaped boulders on his property arranged in a perfectly symmetrical cross measuring 720 by 867 feet, with a sixth boulder bearing a carved human face buried at the intersection. The boat reaches Smith's Cove, long suspected as the origin of the flood tunnels that have defeated treasure hunters since the 1800s. In 1898, treasure hunter Frederick Blair poured red dye into the Money Pit at 90 feet and watched it seep out at Smith's Cove and at several points along the south shore, proving that at least two separate booby-trapped flood tunnels exist beneath the island.
