Bering Sea Gold

Time now for the Bering Sea Gold mid-season status report.

Who bathed in success?

Here it goes.

Best day ever.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Who felt the bitter taste of failure?

And now,

as the head to the back half,

will they ride out on a hot streak?

Boo-ya!

This is the best gold I've seen in this season.

- Very funny. - Ha!

Or be left out in the cold?

You wanna get on in there first?

- I'll get in there. - Boo-ya.

- We'll have this all warmed up and ready. - Perfect.

As Shawn Pomrenke begins the back half of winter,

he finds himself in an unfamiliar place,

on a losing streak.

Season started out hot.

Every hole was paying off.

This last one turned up empty.

Honestly, I can't even remember the last time that happened.

And now I got McCully on my tail.

Not a good time for this.

So, I went back to the drill rocks.

I'm pretty sure this is gonna be a path back to redemption.

If it isn't, I'll be scrambling on the second half.

Boo-ya! Good to go.

All right. Made it to the bottom.

Seems like there's some fresh ground out in front of us here, Joe.

Fresh ground's the best kind of ground to look at.

Yeah, go ahead. Throttle up.

All right-y. Here it comes.

Throttling up!

Ah, here we go.

See what's in there.

What do you think of that ground out in front of you?

Quite a bit of sand down here.

See any gold yet or what?

I'm looking for it, buddy. I'm looking for it.

Aw, keep them eyes peeled.

Yeah, it's gray hard pan.

And then it goes cobbled.

But just not seeing it.

No gold.

It's like a knife in my soul.

Brings on all these bad emotions.

I just don't see the color.

Got me thinking about our next move already.

Yeah, let's go ahead and let this thing moved.

I'm coming up.

yeah.

Man, I must be losing my touch.

Second spot in a row coming up a bust.

Can't spend the rest of my season hunting and pecking.

I hope moving away from the Tomcod this season

ain't gonna bite me in the ass.

So, fingers crossed,

after we move, hopefully, we get back on the good stuff.

We better just keep moving, huh?

While Shawn continues to struggle,

We got lots of ground to work on.

About to tear this up.

Chris McCully keeps on rolling.

You gotta keep making money,

can't stop now, you know?

This season's been pretty sick already.

We've been crushing it.

And last time out, we found a sweet new spot,

and we nicknamed it Wall Street.

We pulled an all nighter as soon as we found it.

We're all pretty drained right now, but I don't really wanna stop the train.

So, I've got a guest diver that's coming in today

so we can keep the gold coming in.

Jessie Holmes is a buddy of mine,

who is the top Iditarod racer.

For years, Jessie wanted to go ice mining with me.

He's in town for the race,

which is really good for me 'cause I really need a diver right now.

We're on good stuff.

Right now, we're on Wall Street.

So, you're gonna get to experience stuff.

- There! See gold action. - Wow.

This spot is really hot.

This is absolutely the perfect spot for Jessie to go dive.

He's gonna keep our team fresh.

And we're gonna keep loading that box.

This is it. You're geared up and ready to rock and roll.

Take it easy.

Mic check, mic check. Jessie, copy?

Yeah, cool, cool. Loud and clear.

When you get to the nozzle, let me know,

so that we can idle you up.

Here we go, idle up.

So, how's the life below 32 feet?

You seeing gold?

Yeah, dude!

Whoo-hoo!

Jessie, I think you're a gold musher now,

not a dog musher.

Back in Nome...

Well, we're making progress.

We got it all the way through.

It went all the way through?

- Yeah. - Damn.

After a stellar first half of the season,

Zeke Tenhoff's looking to ride the momentum for the rest of the winter.

All right, we're in business.

Yeah, I almost totally lost hope there for a minute.

The season's been going super well so far.

And I wanna keep it going on this next new hole.

We're saving a lot of time with the hole melting device that we've made.

But right now, we're on a seriously thick pressure ridge.

So, it's taking us a lot longer than we expected to melt through.

Like, it's honestly pretty embarrassing

how long it's taking us to melt though this ice.

It should take no time at all to melt these holes.

It's already working it's way in.

We've put it on at two.

Hopefully, by three it's punched through.

We went through six feet of ice.

And now, there's another four or five feet of ice to go through.

Passing through another layer, and then, there's another layer.

All these chunks. All this .

We got a dive hole, baby!

Great!

The hole melter melted all the way through.

So, it's like, ten feet of ice.

There' probably multiple layers of pressure ridge.

A pressure ridge is where the winds and the tides force the ice into itself

and create a upside down mountain of ice underwater.

Diving under this pressure ridge is super scary

because these loose ice chunks could float up and plug your ice hole

that you dive in and out of.

I'm gonna suit up.

Our last hole we dug right next to a pressure ridge,

and that was dangerous enough for me.

But now, we're trying to tunnel right directly through the pressure ridge.

And that adds a whole new level of danger.

But I suspect that the gold is good enough that it'll be worth it.

...pause for dramatic effect.

All right. I'm on the bottom.

I'm hoping it doesn't look too dangerous

because we worked really hard to get this hold cut,

and it'd be nice to pull some gold out of it.

Pump action.

All right.

Let's just hope our hard work pays off in gold.

If it shines in dark, that's what it is.

Whoo, baby! The gold's good.

- Yeah! - Yeah, baby!

The gold's that good. It was all worth it.

It was all worth it. Yeah.

That's what it is.

I got the cameras hooked up and working.

The lights are working.

This machine's ready to go in the water.

We're doing it today!

After spending half the season working out the kinks,

Kris Kelly is finally ready to put his bottom crawler to work.

So, we're gonna lift the gold crawler up in the air.

We're gonna slide out those 4x4s.

And then, we're gonna jam it in the hole.

That's what we're doing. So, it's breaking the tradition.

Stand by in position.

- Does everybody know their jobs? - Yeah.

- One on each side of the crawler. - Yep.

Standby, let's rock and roll.

This season's been a dumpster fire so far.

We're aiming for 75 ounces and this crawler to do its magic.

And so far, we have no gold

and the crawler hasn't even gotten underneath the water.

Let's do this, team! Let's do this!

We finally have everything ready. Cameras, power supply, everything.

Trying to use an underwater crawler in ice mining sounds crazy.

But we're about to shock Nome and get rich in the process.

Hey, we're ready. Let's do it!

Going down.

That sucks.

We're . I don't know what to do.

We finally got this thing in the water and it's going down great.

But Andy was too slow to get the hose in the water,

and the suction hose ripped apart.

One step forward, one messed up step backwards.

The hose, where it connects,

we had too much weight on it.

And we should've pushed it in a lot more.

It broke off.

What happened? Did you guys just couldn't move this?

Right, we're trying!

Yeah, well, it broke.

- Yeah? - It broke right off.

Yeah, everything broke.

me.

We were that close to making it work.

We have to get this to work. It's killing me.

12 miles east...

Well, it's not gonna be a full day. It's 2:20.

It's gonna be a full day.