Bering Sea Gold

They're saying this is gonna be

a hundred-year storm.

Hurricane force winds

and 17 foot storm surge.

I've never been in the harbor

with this kind of storm.

The water is rising and rising.

I could lose every boat I own.

The police can off. I'm not going anywhere.

There's no way in hell I am

letting anything happen to that barge.

Oh, my God. Can you even believe this?

My neighbor's house is gone.

The water carried it away.

It's absolute carnage.

And it's only gonna get worse.

Holy...

Where we are right now is gonna be underwater.

Oh, man.

This thing could explode.

And they're trying to get us out, so let's move back.

Power's down, communication's down.

It's complete chaos.

Right now, it looks like

an absolute war zone.

- This is crazy. - I don't know

if we're gonna make it.

Oh, my God.

Everybody's screwed.

Okay, guys,

we need to go out and dive in deeper water.

Go out on a 45-foot dive,

edge of my claim where the gold is coarser.

Throughout Nome, the miners are on edge

as what's being heralded as the storm

of the century lurks only days away.

And perhaps no one is feeling the heat more

than veteran skipper Vernon Adkison.

You guys have dove deep.

I think we can do it safely.

The first half of the season was one

of the worst on record for me.

Hand over fist hemorrhaging money.

The boat's ready to go. I got gold on my claim,

but I've got no divers.

1.75 ounces. Dammit.

So, I'm nowhere near my season goal.

Now we're up against it to get as much diving in

before the giant storm hits.

The pressure's on.

The good news is I'm starting the back half of the season

with a new set of divers and a new plan.

If I'm going someplace I haven't been before,

-I'd rather go out into deep water. - Yup.

Because that's where the gold is, the coarsest

-and the heaviest. - Yeah.

Gary Simpson was part

of my A team last season

and he's an absolute beast.

All right, Gary.

Get out there, buddy.

I'm also bringing in Brad Johnson.

He's a total pro, been doing this for years.

And because we're way behind on our goal

and the storm is brewing,

we're gonna roll the dice on a bold new strategy.

We're gonna dive deep. We're going for the...

-For the heavy gold. - Good.

We're gonna be down there knocking on the door of Davy Jones' locker.

All right.

We're going to one of the deepest

patches on Claim 56.

No more of the shallow stuff.

I don't think that was getting us enough.

We're going 40, 45 feet,

depths where no one's likely gone before on this claim.

It should be completely virgin ground.

If we get out there and get on some good gold,

we got a chance of finishing off with a bang.

-That's what we'll do. -Perfect.

-We got a plan, right? - Yup.

Sounds good to me.

All right, let's get outta here.

Push us off.

Let's go.

We're rockin' and rollin'.

We're gonna go out there and give it a shot.

We'll go out here in the deep water.

We put an extra 20 feet on the hose, which is gonna

make it extremely difficult to handle,

but the guys are willing to go to the extra trouble

for the possibility of getting better gold.

So anyway, here we go.

We're off to the races.

If I'm down there

and I decide everything's okay,

I'll stay down there

'cause I don't wanna keep coming up and down.

Not at those depths, you know?

All right.

Diving in deep water isn't without risk.

That's why most miners won't do it.

With lines that long,

it's much easier to get tangled

and if the diver runs into trouble,

it's a lot further getting back to the top.

And at those depths,

they build up nitrogen in their system.

There's a danger of getting the bends.

How about this one, Gary, is it okay?

That's good.

So you don't try this unless you've got guys

who have been around the block and got balls of steel,

and I've got that now.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of static,

but I can hear you.

Okay. Stand by.

All right. Let's do it.

Okay, Gary, we have water flowing.

We're at about 42 feet now.

This was the first time

that we dove at these depths.

Normally,

I don't like to send the divers down

in depths greater than 30 feet,

because it's just... It gets dangerous.

But we're all hungry for gold right now.

We need some gold in that box.

Okay. You see gold? You see gold? Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I see it.

All right, hammer it.

All right, he's seeing gold.

So we'll go as long as we can.

This is damn good ground.

We're gonna have a nice day.

90% of the time when you see

a boat flipped over like that, someone's dying.

Storms on the Bering Sea

are not a storm like most people

are used to experiencing.

They're much more brutal.

It's just a fact of life

when you're a miner up here.

Every time you go out there in bad weather,

you're taking your life in your own hands.

We're talking typhoon winds,

flooding,

tearing up the sea floor,

which impacts visibility for mining

and they're saying this could be the worst storm in a hundred years.

This could be life-changing.

We're down here at the All In.

Today is very crucial. Here's Andy, hard at work.

Love to see it. Andy, are we ready to do this?

- I'm ready. -Okay.

And hard at work? I wasn't hard at work out, Cap.

I know. I'm joking.

You're doing a great job.

Reaper Nation is hoping to make the most

of their limited time before the storm

by finally getting their underwater crawler underwater.

As long as we have six systems running,

we will be able to go mining

and that's all I'm worrying about right now.

Okay. My is done and ready to go.

Okay, great. I'm here to see that.

You're gonna like my setup.

So the second half of the season is just starting

and the pressure's on.

The plan was to have a two-pronged assault this summer.

The excavator barge the Mistress,

and launching my crawler

from the newly outfitted boat, the All In.

But that's not what happened.

Holy .

we're leaking.

Hey, try to move the nozzle.

That's impossible.

That's one of the tracks moving.

We're not putting this in the water right now.

Everything is going over here.

So, and just in case you're wondering,

this is what getting looks like.

Look at all those big rocks.

This is garbage.

After a miserable first half of the season,

we're way behind in our goal.

As bad as things have been, it's about to get worse.

This superstorm that's coming will shut down mining

for at least a week, maybe the whole season.

So it's critical we finally get the crawler in the water

and we start sucking up gold.

Let's see the lights and the cameras.

Let's start there.

My brother's actually been hustling, for once,

and he says that he's finally got the crawler ready to go.

So we're gonna do a six-point checklist

to make sure everything is dialed in.

Okay. So my system's all simplified now.

It actually looks really nice how I have it, huh?