With the diving platform complete and all safety protocols in place, professional divers Dan Misiaszek and his wife Kathy, known as Frog and Flash, begin their descent into Borehole 10-X. Emergency medical technicians and safety diver John Tapper stand by on the surface. J. Hutton Pulitzer monitors communications and video feeds while Rick, Marty, and the team manage the breathing and comm lines. The mission objective is to reach the 181-foot level where 10-X narrows from eight feet in diameter to just 27 inches, assess the debris blocking the lower shaft, and if possible descend the remaining distance to the cavern at 235 feet. Conditions are immediately difficult: water temperature registers 43 degrees Fahrenheit, visibility is near zero, and the divers cannot see each other from four feet apart.
At roughly 100 feet, communications are lost. Pulitzer and the team scramble to reestablish contact while watching the video feeds show nothing but murky darkness. When comms are restored, a more serious problem emerges: Frog becomes tangled in a web of breathing cables and debris inside the shaft. The team holds its breath as the situation unfolds. Kathy, diving just above her husband, must make an immediate decision. She calls the dive. Pulitzer orders an abort and the divers begin their ascent. Both reach the surface safely, but the incident underscores how dangerous the shaft remains. In the War Room that evening, the team debriefs. Dan and Kathy confirm the obstructions must be addressed, and an estimated four feet of sediment still blocks the entrance to the 27-inch shaft at 181 feet.
Rather than risk sending the divers back down immediately, Rick and Marty arrange for underwater visualization experts Nick Burchill and Brian Abbott of Kongsberg Maritime to deploy an MS 1000 scanning sonar device. The instrument is lowered through a six-inch drill casing left in 10-X from a previous operation, bypassing the debris that blocked the divers. The sonar sends pulses that create a three-dimensional image of the environment at the bottom. Dan Blankenship, now 91, is brought to the monitors to see the data in real time. For Dan, this is the moment he has waited nearly half a century for: independent technological confirmation of what he claims he saw during his own dives in the 1970s.
The sonar results are extraordinary. Brian Abbott identifies a chamber with right angles, squares, and rectangles, shapes that do not occur in nature. A rectangular opening appears on the scans that Abbott interprets as a tunnel approximately five feet wide, appearing to lead in the direction of the Money Pit. A second opening on the opposite side suggests a second tunnel, possibly running toward the ocean or another part of the island. A standalone vertical object measuring roughly 14 inches in diameter shows up on every scan. Abbott believes it could be a column or load-bearing beam, and if it proves to be wood rather than metal, it would confirm a man-made structure. He states that the cavern contains targets he would want to put divers on, and that everything he sees is consistent with human construction rather than natural geology.
With the most detailed data ever obtained from the bottom of 10-X now in hand, the team gathers in the War Room to discuss next steps. Every member commits to returning in the spring. Dan Blankenship advocates drilling a four-foot-wide hole to the cavern and sending a diver down, or pumping the shaft dry and descending by ladder. Marty expresses concern about the risk of implosion if the shaft is dewatered, but agrees that reaching the bottom is now a certainty. Rick frames the season's achievements as the end of the beginning, comparing the moment to Churchill's remarks after El Alamein. For Rick, the greatest reward would not be treasure itself but giving Dan Blankenship the validation that his life's pursuit on Oak Island has been real. The team toasts to the dig and pledges to return.
