Rick and Marty Lagina travel with Craig Tester to Tampa, Florida, to visit Global Marine Exploration, a company specializing in shipwreck artifact salvage. They bring the Spanish coin found in the Oak Island swamp the previous summer for closer examination. Under a microscope, the team can see white sediment in the cracks and green oxidation consistent with an object that spent centuries submerged in a brackish environment. Technician Jason cleans the coin using a mild citric acid bath, and after roughly ninety minutes a date becomes legible on the reverse: 1652, more than 140 years before the Money Pit was discovered. Global Marine confirms the corrosion pattern is consistent with a swamp find, not a land deposit, strengthening the case that the coin was not planted in modern times.
From Tampa the team drives to Winter Springs, Florida, to visit Kellyco Metal Detectors, where they had acquired the Deepmax X6 unit used to scan the swamp the previous year. CEO Stu Auerbach explains why diver Tony Sampson was unable to locate the source of the strong nonferrous readings: metal objects submerged in water over long periods can deteriorate and form a kind of metallic matrix or cloud in the surrounding soil. Disturbing the ground during a dive breaks the contact and causes the signal to vanish. Rather than dismissing the readings as false, Auerbach believes they confirm that metal objects are present. He suggests returning when the swamp is frozen, which would allow the team to scan from a stable surface without disturbing the material below.
One week later, Rick and Marty return to Oak Island in the dead of winter. Kellyco representative Dave Spencer arrives from Florida with the Deepmax X6 fitted with a larger frame coil mounted to a sled. Joining the team are metal detection experts Gary Drayton and the father-and-son team of Bob and Robert Leonard. Dave Blankenship clears vegetation from the frozen swamp with a brush hog while the crew lays out a grid system for systematic scanning. Initial passes return nothing, and frustration sets in. Then the readings begin to spike, climbing past 90 percent on the graph, well into the range associated with highly conductive metals such as gold and silver. The data mirrors what the team recorded the previous summer.
That evening, the team brings Dave Spencer to Dan Blankenship's home to review the processed data. Dan, now 91, remains a vital source of knowledge for the team. Spencer's three-dimensional analysis reveals a nonferrous target roughly 15 to 20 feet long and about three feet wide buried in the swamp. Bob Leonard suggests it could be a shipwreck, noting that pirates were known to wreck ships on islands, remove the treasure, bury it, and leave markers for later retrieval. Captain William Kidd, the notorious privateer who claimed to have hidden a fortune east of Boston before his execution in 1701, is mentioned as a possible candidate. Marty remains cautious, noting that linear anomalies aligned with the scanning direction can sometimes be artifacts of the equipment rather than genuine targets.
The mood shifts abruptly when Peter Fornetti arrives with a newspaper article reporting that a member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly has introduced a bill that could replace the Oak Island Treasure Act of 2010 with a new heritage research permit system. The proposed legislation could strip the team of their right to keep a percentage of any treasure found on their own property and make further excavation prohibitively expensive. With swamp permits still pending and the new political threat looming, Marty agrees to temporarily redirect operations from the swamp to the Money Pit, a decision that represents a major milestone. The Money Pit has never been properly re-excavated using modern methods, and for both brothers it remains the central obsession that drew them to Oak Island in the first place.
