This week on The Curse of Oak Island, the guys were continuing to drill at borehole RF1, hoping to break through to the Money Pit.
Working on information learned just last week that there’s a treasure vault shaped anomaly buried at 160 feet, that’s 13 feet by 13 feet (the same diameter as the Money Pit found in 1795), the guys aimed the giant oscillating drill in that direction ever since.
At the start, the results looked pretty good. The hammer grab brought up a lot of timber, which the guys decided was older than any they’d seen before.
A lot of these beams had Roman numerals on them. Terry Mathieson speculated they were a construction guide for the original builders of the Money Pit.
As they approached 160 feet, the hammer grab pulled up a big metal sheet. Rick said, “that’s a shield.”
The guys believed that this was the metal shield used by William Chapel and his men in 1931 to protect themselves from flooding and cave-ins.
The Chapel Shaft was thought to have fallen just shy of the Money Pit, which meant the guys could now have been merely a few away from the treasure vault.
Nothing on Oak Island is easy
But because this is Oak Island and nothing is easy here, they hit a snag. A build-up of pressure on the oscillating drill caused a bracket to break on the crane, which shut down the operation.
Something big and hard was in the way of that drill, and it wasn’t going to shift easily. Marty Lagina asked, “it’s grinding on something, is it something we want to find?”
Vanessa Lucido, CEO of ROC Drilling Equipment, suggested they stop drilling and use the weight of the hammer combined with gravity to try to dislodge the object before continuing.
The team expected this to take aa few days, so they decided to pack up and go home for the night.
The Oak Island team search for treasure at Samuel Ball’s home
But we all know the guys can’t sit around and do nothing for long, right? They turned their attention to Lot 25, which is the area where 18th Century Oak Island landowner Samuel Ball had his property.
Ball, a former slave from South Carolina, arrived on the island just after the American revolution as a humble cabbage farmer but went on to become very wealthy and own a large part of the island.
“It’s a real rags-to-riches story,” said Oak Island historian Charles Barkhouse.
Many speculated Ball’s wealth was possibly due to discovering and perhaps hoarding some of the Oak Island treasure.
Working on information that an underground tunnel-shaped anomaly was under lot 25, Jack Buckley was handed a spade and told to start digging.
He did not disappoint, as a short time later, he unearthed a tunnel entrance.
The whole team gathered to watch a small camera, fed through the tunnel. The guys were already asking if this could be where Ball hid the treasure.
Of course, there was another snag.
A rock blocked the path of the camera but left the guys wondering if it was intentionally hiding something.
As Marty said right at the end of the episode: “typical of Oak Island, it never goes easily.”
He couldn’t be more right.
The Curse of Oak Island airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on History.
Wow this is interesting i hope they find it