Season five opens under a cloud of tragedy and destruction. A series of harsh winter storms has devastated Oak Island, washing away the South Shore Road and cutting off all vehicle access to the Money Pit area. Rick Lagina returns early to assess the damage with Dave Blankenship and his wife Garnett, who have weathered more than 25 years on the island and call this winter one of the worst they have encountered. With major drilling rigs scheduled to arrive within a week, heavy equipment operator Billy Gerhardt leads a full road reconstruction, a job that costs both time and money the team can ill afford to lose. Worse still, the fellowship is reeling from the sudden death of Craig Tester's 16-year-old son Drake, who died in March from complications following an epileptic seizure. Drake had been the youngest member of the team, and when Craig and stepson Jack Begley arrive on the island, the reunion is deeply emotional. The team dedicates the season to finding something meaningful for Craig and for Drake, whose signature on one of last year's caissons read simply: "Forever family."
With the road passable again, Rick, Charles Barkhouse, and Dave Blankenship meet remote camera specialist Jeff Christopherson at the C1 shaft to send a Spectrum 120 high-definition camera 170 feet underground. After nine months of settling, the water clarity is the best ever recorded in the cavity, and the team spots several anomalies on the chamber floor: a hook-shaped object casting clear shadows, a woven mesh structure, and what appear to be chain-like links. In the War Room, Frank Schiefelbein of Barnett and Associates processes the footage through the Prohawk video enhancement system, and the team reviews upgraded images of the shiny gold-coloured object first photographed two years earlier. The enhanced footage makes it look far more like a genuine piece of metal than a reflection, shifting even skeptics like Marty toward believing something real is sitting at the bottom of C1.
Professional diver Mike Huntley descends C1 using a Bosun's chair, with dive supervisor Dave Pilot monitoring from a communications trailer alongside Rick, Marty, Craig, and Dave Blankenship. Paramedics Reed and decompression specialist Dave Roode stand by with a hyperbaric chamber on site. The chair immediately stirs up silt, destroying visibility, and Huntley switches to working blind with an underwater metal detector. He gets a metal hit embedded in the wall and begins chiseling at it, but the clock is running: the planned 20-minute dive stretches past 30 minutes, pushing into dangerous exposure territory for both nitrogen buildup and hypothermia. With seconds to spare, Huntley makes it back to the chair and is hauled up, then rushed into the hyperbaric chamber for 71 minutes of decompression. The sediment bag he brings up yields nothing significant under a pinpointing metal detector, but the team resolves to send him back with a single, focused task: metal detect the chamber floor and retrieve whatever he finds.
While the C1 operation plays out, metal detection expert Gary Drayton and Peter Fornetti search storm-eroded ground at Isaac's Point on the island's eastern shore. They uncover a double woodcutter's ax dating to the early 1900s and a copper coin with visible designs that Gary estimates at 1700s vintage, possibly English or French, which is sent off for cleaning and dating. Separately, Alex Lagina, Jack Begley, Peter, and Gary continue sifting through the GAL-1 spoils pile from last season and pull a large hand-forged rose head spike from deep beneath the surface. Gary identifies it as pre-1780 and possibly as old as the 1600s, noting the symmetrical head and petal-shaped hammer marks characteristic of handmade construction. At Dan Blankenship's home, the 94-year-old treasure hunter examines the spike and agrees it is not a railroad spike, urging the team to have it analyzed and dated.
The War Room session lays out the season's drilling strategy: a Geotech program using approximately 40 six-inch core holes drilled to depths of up to 200 feet, with GAL-1 as the starting point. Dan insists every hole be taken to bedrock. The team also agrees that future C1 dives must be limited to a single objective to reduce the danger Mike Huntley faced, settling on a metal-detector sweep with immediate retrieval as the next mission. The season premiere closes with the full fellowship gathered around Craig and Jack, affirming that the search will carry on not just for Drake, but with him.
