In the Money Pit area, the season's final caisson, MP-1, advances toward the solution channel where soil sampling earlier in the year identified the strongest silver concentrations on the island. Alex Lagina arrives at the platform as Terry Matheson reports the previous day's progress at 138 feet, twelve to twenty feet short of the target horizon. Gary Drayton's pinpointer signals on the first bucket and lifts out a section of two-inch drill pipe that closely resembles a 19th-century length recovered earlier in the season. Adam Embleton and operator Ed report a fresh depth of 151 feet, with a target of 215 feet for MP-1. The following day Rick Lagina joins Terry on the platform as the hole reaches 195 feet, where Gary recovers a heavily twisted piece of metal that he reads as a possible tool fragment. The next bucket yields a section of stained, multicolored wood that Gary calls exotic, with a grain that suggests palm. Rick notes that no such wood should occur naturally in the solution channel, raising the possibility that the piece was pushed down from above during an earlier searcher operation. The drill grounds out at 210 feet on bedrock, five feet shy of the design depth, and MP-1 is closed out as the season's last shaft.
On Lot 8, Marty Lagina walks Rick and Craig Tester through the trench he opened beside the stone cradle uncovered earlier in the season. The trench bottomed out on bedrock at six feet, even though hand excavation inside the cradle has gone well below that level without striking rock. To probe the floor of the feature, Dr. Ian Spooner proposes a hammer drill. Scott Barlow drives two three-foot holes through the cradle floor, and archaeologist Fiona Steele bags samples from each. Laird Niven judges the recovered material to be too soft for bedrock, and a control hole sunk into a piece of nearby slate confirms the reading: the slate proves significantly harder. Marty closes the day with a clear position that the cradle work is not finished until the team understands what lies at the bottom of it.
Closer to the shore, Katya Drayton, surveyor Steve Guptill, and heavy equipment operator Billy Gerhardt continue working through spoils left behind by 1965 treasure hunter Robert Dunfield, whose 100-foot crater was abandoned at 143 feet when seawater overwhelmed the dig. As Billy turns over a fresh pile, Katya picks up a clear pinpointer signal and recovers a heavily worn silver coin with no visible milled edge, a feature initially read as evidence of seventeenth-century or earlier hammered coinage. At the laboratory, Emma Culligan returns an XRF reading of roughly 87 percent silver and uses CT imaging to bring out the bust on the obverse and the partial legend MVS, the closing characters of GVLIELMVS. An overlay against a known reference identifies the piece specifically as a William III sixpence struck between 1697 and 1701, part of the milled coinage produced under the Great Recoinage of 1696 overseen by Sir Isaac Newton at the Royal Mint.
In the war room, the team gathers for the final meeting of the year. Steve presents the season's heat map, color-coded by century: orange for the 1700s, blue for the 1800s onward, and pink for anything earlier. Steve counts more than eight hundred finds plotted on the map, while Laird puts the year's total closer to twelve hundred. Pink alone reveals island-wide activity at a scale Laird describes as having no parallel he knows of in North America. Discussion turns to the Lot 8 boulder, which Fiona estimates may date as far back as the 1200s, and which Rick now compares to a carved-slot stone he examined in the Portuguese Azores, where the spacing of the surrounding stones closely matched the Lot 8 arrangement. Scott reiterates that bedrock has still not been reached beneath the cradle, and Marty signals an intent to eventually excavate underneath the stone. On Lot 5, the season's folded coin and decorative lead artifact, together with the structure originally read as a 20th-century well that has now opened into something larger, possibly linked to the nearby rounded stone foundation, lead Marty to suggest the group may finally be looking at the long-sought camp. The sand road is reviewed as a likely route from Lot 5 to the Money Pit. Returning to the hand cannon fragment and the four stoneshots, two of which were recovered this season at the wash plant, Marty sets out the chronological argument: stoneshots fall out of European use after roughly 1450, and the team's Azores contacts have placed common hand cannon use in the 1300s. The Pitblado coin, narrowed in this season's research to a striking window of 1369 to 1371, and the materials lifted from the solution channel at depths where they have no business existing, round out the inventory.
Dr. Spooner closes the technical discussion with an idea suggested by Dr. Fred Michel: testing the wood recovered from the Money Pit shafts, on the basis that submerged wood acts as a natural filter and concentrates dissolved metals. Of the fifteen samples processed, the wood from Shaft 2A in 2024 has returned the highest silver reading and the third-highest gold reading recorded on the island, and Marty commits to extending the program. Marty then unveils a one-ounce gold piece struck with a Canadian maple leaf, intended as a physical marker for the spot the team will sink first in Season 14. Rick brings the season to an end with a brief tribute to the people around the table, naming them as family and as the true treasure of the search.
