The Karma-1 shaft reaches its full depth of 212 feet in the solution channel, but the final spoils searched by Rick Lagina, metal detection expert Gary Drayton, and Terry Matheson produce no hits. Billy Gerhardt trucks the material to the wash plant, where Charles Barkhouse and the team sort through Karma-1 spoils by hand and recover a hand-wrought rose head spike, a type Gary has encountered while detecting in Europe. With Karma-1 complete, Rick and Marty Lagina turn to Top Pocket Find (TPF), a new shaft less than ten feet to the northeast, positioned over the highest silver concentrations in the solution channel, near where foreman James Pitblado reportedly recovered a 14th-century Portuguese coin in 1849. After stalling at 25 feet on backfill from a prior dig, the SB Canada crew resumes with ROC Equipment's rotating oscillator.
On Lot 8, archaeologist Fiona Steele continues excavating the cradle-like stone formation beneath the 40,000-pound boulder. Rick and Peter Fornetti inspect the site, noting the triangular arrangement of surrounding boulders and a possible connection to the December Triangle marked on Zena Halpern's believed 14th-century Templar map. As Fiona removes smaller stones, she uncovers blue-grey clay mixed with charcoal that appears to have been used as mortar to seal part of the feature, a composition similar to clay found on Lot 5 and in the Money Pit. Samples are collected for XRD testing. Later, Rick returns with Jack Begley to find the lower stones firmly locked in place. When a dry chunk of the binding is mixed with water, it takes on the consistency of cement, confirming the stones were set with man-made mortar whose composition could help date the structure.
In the War Room, Rick, Craig Tester, and the team welcome researcher Charlotte Wheatley, a colleague of Emiliano, Judi, and Corjan Mol, who has spent four years studying Halpern's map. Charlotte traced the inscription "Le Lionceau de Talmont" to Talmont-sur-Gironde on the west coast of France, home to a fortified Benedictine church dedicated to Saint Radegund. Oriented at roughly 292.4 degrees, a straight line from the church's axis across the Atlantic leads to Oak Island. Two more Radegund churches within 60 kilometers, in Courant and Saint-Radegonde, share orientations of approximately 292.1 degrees and also point to the island. All three date to the 12th or 13th century, a period tied through Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians to the Knights Templar. Charlotte notes that Radegund, who founded the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Poitiers in 552 AD (a site reportedly housing a piece of the True Cross), is the only saint depicted carrying a book with a four-dot cross, the same symbol found on Oak Island's H+O stone in 1921 and at Templar strongholds across Europe.
In the lab, Alex Lagina presents the spike to blacksmithing expert Carmen Legge and metallurgist Emma Culligan. Emma's XRF analysis identifies cold-short iron with exceptionally high phosphorus, trace manganese, and elevated sulfur, placing its date at the mid-1700s or earlier. Carmen describes a square-shanked spike, originally five to six inches long, broken and reused as an improvised fastener typical of planking for vaults or boxes. Recovered from below 167 feet in Karma-1, deeper than any previous searchers reached in that area, the find prompts Doug Crowell to suggest a link to the Duc d'Anville expedition of 1746, citing a ship's log he found in the Nova Scotia Archives in 2017 describing the burial of treasure in a deep pit on an island in the region. Meanwhile, the TPF shaft suffers a ground collapse at roughly 105 feet, forcing the SB Canada crew led by Adam Embleton to backfill the zone and telescope to smaller seven-foot-diameter caissons inside the original eight-foot shaft to reach 220 feet.
