[Chris breathing underwater]
[Chris exclaiming]
[Chris speaking]
[Wilson speaking]
It's good ground, huh?
[Chris speaking]
[motor whirring]
[motor sputtering]
[motor turns off]
[Chris bleeping]
Oh. [breathing heavily]
[Wilson] Air compressor shut off.
[Chris breathing heavily]
[Chris speaking]
[breathing heavily]
[motor sputtering]
[breathing heavily]
[Chris groaning]
[narrator] In gold mining, striking the mother lode
is a fabled dream as old as time.
[Shawn] Yeah, there's, like, $5,000 right there.
[laughing]
[narrator] And in the fleet's quest for those untold riches,
there's a lesson to be learned
in every ice mining tale.
[enthralling instrumental music playing]
Price of gold is skyrocketing.
Can't complain about that.
It adds up quick.
At the end of the day, it adds up to be thousands.
I'm excited to get down there.
Gold's looking really good down there.
Hell, we're ready to rock and roll.
[narrator] Nome's resident king
is ready to get back to mining,
and score big at just the right time.
We're almost at the end of our free royalty,
so if we don't put gold in the box,
then we lose 15%.
Hopefully, it will be a smooth day.
We got seven more days before our royalty-free window
closes with Vern, so it's time to make every minute count.
We were on hot gold the last dive,
before the pump engine quit on us.
Now we have a new one.
I'm ready to pound this paystreak.
And today should be the biggest payday of the season thus far.
Beautiful day to go diving.
Let's do this.
Damn it!
Get this water nice and hot,
pile this umbilical up in here to thaw it out.
They don't pay to be up top.
We gotta get down below.
[man speaking]
[Shawn] Hopefully sooner than later.
[man laughing]
[man] There she goes.
Got hot water.
One step closer.
Get the box set up, get the pump primed.
[Shawn breathing underwater]
[Shawn] Wow.
Mother Nature's chandeliers, eh?
[Shawn] Oh, yeah.
Yeah. There's all these nice big rocks here.
Lovin' it.
Beautiful-looking material here.
I'm gonna find the nozzle and get it over here.
[man 2] Let's fire this pump up.
[Shawn] Got suction now.
I see a few little pieces here and there.
Hasn't turned into anything yet.
When we move into this rock a little bit, see if gets any better.
Well, we're running out of days off free royalties.
I want to put some gold in the box.
[narrator] While the king looks to fund his empire across the ice...
[enthralling instrumental music playing]
[Chris] Wilson. Thanks for coming.
And I think the trick is, we'll just...
get rid of the smudge and snow.
And then, uh, I'll thaw out the carburetor with the gun.
[narrator] Nome's young gun Chris McCully
has added some firepower to his armory.
We'll just fire everything up and with the box in there,
the heat of the muffler will...
-[Wilson] Saturate the stuff. -Yeah.
[narrator] Bringing on a trusted friend and diver
to get his team back up to full strength.
[Wilson] The box should go over this motor.
[Chris] It fits.
Sweet. Now we just gotta cut the window.
I started the winter with hot gold,
but things fell apart real quick.
I put the spark plugs in here last night
and the threads are stripped.
Look, you guys don't even know how to put a spark back on.
Idiots.
I've dove solo once,
but this is not gonna work out in the winter.
I need a full team for the rest of the way.
And I lucked out getting Wilson.
He's a great diver,
and a great tender, and that's what I need.
I got a lot of dramas lately.
It's time for me to make money now,
and I got the good diver.
This is for the better.
We're on a hot paystreak right now,
and the deeper it goes, the better the gold.
So today we're gonna go deeper than we've gone all season.
Almost 40 feet.
All I gotta do now is just get on my wet suit
and [bleep] go get some gold, man.
All right, G. It's showtime. Yeah.
Most guys out here would only go 15 to 25 feet deep.
'Cause it's super dangerous to go under the ice this deep.
But the gold is so good,
I'm gonna take that risk.
Whoo! Yes!
All right.
Whoo! [bleep] yeah, dude.
Time to get some gold, baby!
[narrator] Divers build up nitrogen gas with every dive.
The deeper the dive, the faster it builds.
[Shawn groans]
Too much can cause decompression sickness,
known as "the bends."
So, for dives over 33 feet,
divers are limited to three hours.
And on the way up, they perform a three-minute safety stop
to eliminate excess nitrogen.
Too quick of an ascent...
can cause tissue damage or even death.
[Wilson] Comm check, comm check.
[Chris speaking]
[Wilson] Yeah, I can hear you.
[Chris breathing underwater]
[Chris speaking]
Yeah. Don't wanna push it too hard.
[Chris speaking]
Okay, I got to the bottom.
Nice, sandy bottom.
Yeah. [chuckling]
All right. Copy that.
[motor revving]
[Chris speaking]
How's the ground?
[Chris speaking]
It's good ground, huh?
[Chris speaking]
[Wilson] Yeah. Chris just got down there, first dive of the day.
But we're at, like, almost 40 feet.
[motor sputtering]
[motor turns off]
[Chris bleeping]
Oh. [breathing heavily]
[Wilson] Air compressor shut off.
[Chris] Oh. [breathing heavily]
[Wilson] Come up. We're having air compressor issues.
[Chris speaking]
[breathing heavily and bleeping]
[groans]
[Chris groaning and breathing heavily]
[Chris speaking]
[Chris groaning]
[breathing heavily]
[groaning]
[breathing heavily]
[Wilson speaking]
[Chris speaking]
[Wilson] We're having issues with the air compressor.
We just need a new spark plug.
Should be able to clean it up.
[exclaims]
Whoo!
This is why diving deep is so dangerous.
If you're at 20 feet and your air compressor goes down,
it's a lot easier to get to the top.
But when you're at 40 feet,
it's a long ways down there.
But the [bleep] part is, uh, I have a three-minute safety stop,
so I wasn't able to complete that.
Um, that's kind of dangerous too.
So our manager selected to call it.
And, uh...
Yeah, and then we'll have Wilson back down there.
[motor whirring]
It really sucks that I had to come out so fast
and I was not able to do my decompression stop.
So it's not safe to dive again right now.
But even though we're diving deep, Wilson can handle it.
He's got the experience.
That's why having him on the team
is a game changer.
Yeah, we'll just keep the ball rolling from here.
I feel pretty confident for him to go back down there
because everything is running smooth.
Uh, the compressor just had a little issue,
but I got that fixed right away.
He's gonna do just fine.
Get money.
[breathing underwater]
-[Chris] Got to the bottom? -[Wilson speaking]
[Chris] Copy that.
All right. He's ready. Ready!
[breathing underwater]
[motor revving]
[Wilson speaking]
And there we have it. Wilson's back in the water.
And we're making money, baby!
Whoo!
That's the greatest feeling.
[enthralling instrumental music playing]
[narrator] Seven miles east.
[Kris] Okay, let's break in the action.
The plan right now is to get Andy in the hole as fast as we can.
We're on gold,
we're following in a line,
and now we've got to track it down like wild hounds.
[narrator] Since the beginning of the season...
[Kris] I'm gonna, like, concentrate on keeping it cheap,
making our dollar holler, you know?
Like, I'm not spending any money.
And I don't want to hear any complaints.
[narrator] ...Captain Kris has concentrated on keeping it thrifty.
John, status report.
[narrator] And after a rough start...
[John laughs mockingly]
[John speaking]
Yeah!
[narrator] ...the threadbare operation finally bore fruit.
[John speaking]
[Kris] And this is where the skill comes in. We got this.
[narrator] Now, Reaper Nation is ready
to finally rack up big numbers.
[Kris] Okay. You ready to rock and roll?
Arms out.
I took a gamble on this claim nobody else cared about.
It looked like a dumpster fire at first,
but we tapped into a hot paystreak.
Okay. You ready?
Let me look. Hold on.
I need Andy to feed on it.
We're way behind at this point.
All right!
You know the job.
You know what to do.
Make that money at all costs.
Andy's like a whale. Terrible on land,
but underneath the water, that mother [bleep] can move.
[Andy speaking]
[Kris] Okay.
Idle up.
I know you just got down there, homey,
but what do you think we're seeing for a dollar figure?
[Andy speaking]
Okay. Well, keep up the good work, then.
[Andy speaking]
[Kris] Okay, that's good.
I like a little bit more of a chipper attitude.
[Andy speaking]
So I can hear you're in a good mood.
[Andy speaking]
[Kris] Andy's in a good mood.
That means he's seeing a lot of gold.
So, you see we're on some gold, huh?
[Andy speaking]
[Kris] Yeah, baby!
Um, he's in a really good mood because if he wasn't on gold,
he'd be in a whiny bitch mood and he wouldn't let me talk to him.
But right now, everything's going good.
[man 3 speaking]
[Kris] Everything okay?
-[man 3 speaking] -[Kris speaking]
[man 3 speaking]
[Kris speaking]
[man 3 speaking]
[Kris speaking]
Andy's on great gold, so we should be raking in the ounces.
But I don't really know if we are
because the sluice box sprung a leak.
Some of the material isn't processing through the box.
It's just flying out the front.
And I'm sure gold is in it.
Maybe it's a lot, maybe it's a little.
There's no way to tell right now.
We're leaking holes out of the front of the box.
Right now, though, we're not gonna pick [bleep].
We're gonna run the rest of the day
and just see where we come out at the end of the day.
I'm not into catch and release.
But you lose more money when you don't mine.
[Kris] You know?
If we try to fix that box right now,
we'd have to shut down
and it'll cost us a couple of hours.
As a captain, I'm making a judgment call.
It's better to work with a [bleep] sluice box
than try to take the time to fix it.
I'm guessing the leak isn't too bad
and we'll still make money.
I hope the gold gods are with me.
When you come out, John jumped straight in.
I don't wanna [bleep] around and waste any time.
[Andy speaking]
Okay.
Gold looks good down there.
I hope we have something to look at in the back.
[Joe over radio] Hey, Shawn.
[Shawn over radio] Yeah, go ahead, Joe.
[Joe] What you see down there?
[Shawn breathing underwater]
I, I'm seeing a piece here,
a piece there,
trying to sniff it out right now.
[narrator] After long hours under the ice,
the king's confidence is slowly fading
along with any sign of gold.
-[radio static] -[Shawn speaking]
We're making just enough to cover expenses.
That's no fun.
We might have to move.
You're not seeing it, you're not making it.
[Joe] All right.
[Shawn over radio] But I've had enough for one day.
Get the hell out of here.
-[radio static] -[Joe over radio] 10-4.
[Shawn speaking]
[Joe speaking]
[Shawn speaking]
[Joe] I think we'll find it somewhere nearby.
[Shawn speaking]
I thought today was gonna be massive.
Easily our best day
to start setting this season on fire.
But I was totally wrong.
Instead, we probably need to move.
We only have a few days of royalty free mining left.
So, I don't wanna waste time right now.
We'll see what the scale says.
But it doesn't look good.
That's the way it goes.
You win some, you lose some.
It's not going well at all.
[narrator] As the king humbly retreats...
[Kris] Talk to me.
[over radio] So, how much money are you making me?
[Andy speaking]
That's my dawg.
Go sniff that [bleep] out.
[narrator] Despite the loose sluice,
the thrifty miner still feels
he's on the winning side of the ledger.
I really need this gold to build up my crawler
and keep making my empire bigger.
So, good job, buddy.
[Andy over radio]
[Kris] I'm rolling the dice here.
It's possible the sluice box is so messed up,
we're barely making anything right now.
But we can't afford to stop mining
and jerry-rig something,
Andy's on great gold,
so I'm feeling good about our chances.
[Andy speaking]
[Kris] [bleep], man.
[Andy] Ah.
[Kris] Okay, you're done.
[Andy] I'm coming up.
So, he had a great dive. He made a lot of gold.
Everything's good.
Um, he's-- uh, gloves breaking apart.
Andy's at risk of getting hypothermia.
We gotta get him up ASAP.
But I'm still not stopping to fix the box.
We're gonna get John down and keep going.
We need to make every penny we can.
And at this point, we need a lot of pennies.
Yeah, baby.
-And that's how an orca goes up on the ice to get... -[Andy speaking]
[man] Good job.
[Andy] I tried to go as much as I could.
[Kris] You did a great job.
[Andy] I got the two tone.
-[Kris] Yeah, you got a little frostbite. -[Andy] Oh, boy.
[Andy speaking]
Oh, [bleep].
[Kris speaking]
[John] All right.
Andy found a lot of gold.
And we gotta keep going on with this momentum,
we'll just see what you can see.
-[John speaking] -Okay, good luck.
Hey, John. How's it going down there?
[John over radio]
[Kris] Okay, sounds great. Keep up the good work.
We got a couple of little problems.
But nothing I can't handle.
[Kris] How's it going down there?
[John speaking]
Well, that's great news.
[narrator] After six hours and two dives,
Kris is satisfied with mining down below.
[Kris speaking]
We gotta make sure we get our goal.
[narrator] But the money conscious captain's
got a plan to do a little mining topside too.
[Kris speaking]
[John speaking]
PJ, drop that rope.
John's done for his side for the day.
Right now, we're gonna attach the nozzle to a rope.
We're gonna bring up the nozzle to the top,
we're gonna suck up that area,
where the holes went underneath the sluice box.
All day long,
this sluice box has been leaking material from the front.
So, the gold should've poured right next to it.
And I'm not leaving a bunch of money sitting on the ice.
We're gonna use the nozzle to suck the gold off the ice.
[Kris] I've never done this before,
and I hope this goes really good.
The truth is,
you should never use the nozzle out of the water
to suck up anything off the ice.
It can lead to a disaster.
Like a [bleep] fire hose disaster.
The risk is if we suck up too much air at once,
it'll shoot a rooster tail 40, 50 feet away.
Just stand by, idle it up slowly,
and don't get crazy.
The nozzle's designed to suck up water.
Our whole system is designed to suck up water.
If you start sucking up air,
that could blast out the box
and blast all the gold out the back.
So, hopefully, that won't happen.
Idle up.
[machine starts whirring]
It's working!
-[man 2 speaking] -[Kris] A little more.
[man 2 speaking]
[Kris] Idle up.
[Andy speaking]
[Kris speaking]
[explodes]
[man] Oh!
[Kris speaking]
[machine stops]
[Andy speaking]
[Kris] Damn.
-[man 2 speaking] -[Kris laughs]
-Are you okay? -[man 2 laughs] Yeah.
Uh, that's bad.
We probably did lose a little bit of gold
when the rooster tail happened.
So, this idea was not the best idea I've ever had.
Definitely won't go down in the Hall of Fame of great ideas.
It blasted the sluice box pretty good
and material sprayed all over.
There's a good chance this idea cost us gold.
Hopefully, after six hours on gold,
we still have a strong cleanup.
But now, I'm not so sure.
I'm gonna turn the air off.
At least we got the gold
and hopefully we kept most of it.
It is-- Look, it is what it is, at this point.
Hopefully, we get money.
[narrator] As the sun sets on the frozen land of dreams...
[Chris] How we doing down there?
-[radio static] -[Wilson speaking]
[Chris speaking]
[narrator] ...Wilson hits the three-hour mark.
And it's clear that today,
the McCully team was not out of their depth.
[Chris over radio] All right, Wilson, uh, come up whenever you're ready.
[Wilson speaking]
[Chris] Yeah, do your, uh,
do a three minute safety stuff.
[Wilson speaking]
[Chris] That's it, Wilson. It's done.
We got all our dives in.
Wow.
It's been a long day.
I knew diving deep could be risky.
And most teams couldn't pull it off.
But we are pushing six hours and you know what?
And that box is gonna get lit up.
You gotta be in it to win it.
We're making money. We're crushing it.
And it's time for payday.
Life could not get any better than this.
Hello and welcome to another episode
of Kris Kelly's Secret Guide to successful mining.
Today we're gonna be talking about safety
and cost of safety.
How much safety can you afford?
-[Andy] None. -You know, Andy, please stop.
No talking.
Here we go.
A real reliable, dependable snow machine costs about 20 grand.
That's a lot of safety.
Andy, how do you feel about 20 grand?
Way too much safety.
That's too much safety, Andy says.
I like the $3000 safety.
Andy likes the $3000 safety,
and bless his heart for that.
Because that's the kind of safety we can afford.
Now we're gonna talk about if there's four of us,
we're 10 miles out of town, the blizzard hits,
what would you do if you knew
that only one snow machine was coming to save you?
How are you gonna get
a 1000 plus pounds back to town?
This is what we would do.
We would all get on the snow machine,
I tell you to go get that shovel,
-and we would drive away while you go and get it. -[all laugh]
[Shawn] I really don't see a whole lot.
[Joe] Pretty clean pan, eh?
A little bit of fine stuff, but...
[Shawn] I wanna see more gold.
[narrator] As the king braces
for the looming unwanted royalty payments,
his once high hopes have turned dim.
[Shawn] Let's see what we got here.
One, two, three, four, five...
Six point one.
Not good.
Could be way better.
[narrator] Six point one ounces brings in at over 14 grand,
far from what Shawn was after.
And the confident king learns,
never to count his chickens before they hatch.
Well, just have to get back out there and get after it.
Well, I think I got ahead of myself.
We're at the end of our royalty free days,
and the gold's drying up.
We're gonna have to move.
And this time, I have to make sure we're on killer gold.
Otherwise, I'm not gonna hit my goal for the season.
We got a long ways to go.
There's still a lot of gold left in that ocean.
[narrator] Down the road...
[Kris] Are you seeing gold?
Lots of fines.
[narrator] ...the thrifty miner is hoping the gold was so good,
he made the right call, not fixing the loose sluice.
[Kris] Okay, this is what we got.
The problem is, I don't need a scale to know I got [bleep].
[narrator] But that's not gonna happen.
[Kris] I knew I was getting gold.
Andy, man, Andy gets me all pumped up.
John gets me all pumped up.
Everybody's hooping and hollering.
[Andy] We're all seeing it.
[Kris] Yeah, well, it's not in the box.
I kept telling myself, "I hope it wiggled in there."
So, I know gold.
And I'm looking at this pile of gold
after two long days of working,
and it kinda blows.
The leak in the box probably killed us.
And honestly, so did my plan with the nozzle.
Let's see where we end up.
Here we go.
We're working hard.
We're moving a lot.
That's two ounces.
There's three ounces, come on.
Gold just went up 10 percent.
This is our chance.
I got a lot of bills this summer.
My baby needs new toys.
A little over six ounces.
Uh, like I said, we can do better.
Let's just keep grinding away.
[narrator] Six ounces is worth a little over 14 grand,
likely less than they would've pulled in
if they'd fixed the box.
And the thrifty miner finds the true meaning
of penny wise and pound foolish.
We know we were on gold though, right?
We saw it. Everything was going decent.
[Andy] I thought it was.
-The hunches I was on paid out pretty good. -[Kris] Uh...
We gotta do something about the box, right?
-[man 3] Yep. -Box?
New sluice box is, like, $68,000.
You're gonna get it sent up from California.
It's a [bleep] nightmare, uh, especially this time of year.
The good news is we're on great gold.
And that's the hardest part of mining,
and we've accomplished that.
The bad news is we can't afford a new sluice box.
So, we're gonna do a quick fix
and see if that does the trick.
But we might be stuck
in a "need to spend money to make money" situation.
We'll see.
-Anyways, let's go to work. -[claps]
Well, that was a kick in the nuts.
[narrator] By the harbor...
[Chris] All right.
So far, it's looking good.
I wanna see what we have today.
[narrator] With the push into deeper ground
and the addition of Wilson,
the young gun's deep dive may yield deep pockets.
[Chris] I'm diving deep.
Not a lot of people tap into the deeper water,
because you need to really be experienced,
and, you know, you really need to know your stuff.
You know, I, I lucked out
because I got Wilson right now.
And I think we're gonna be golden.
All right, let's lay it out on the scale.
There's 200 grams.
Three hundred grams.
Three hundred ninety eight grams divided by 31.1.
What do you got?
Ooh, 12.7.
Wow. This ground's really good.
Really, really good.
[narrator] Twelve point seven ounces cashes in at over 29 grand,
proving sometimes the greater risk
comes with a greater reward.
And the young gun vaults to the top of the gold count.
[Chris] Yeah, it's such a relief, you know,
like, all that hard work, all that risk that I've taken,
now I'll pay you off.
The sky is the limit.
All I gotta do now is just fine tune everything,
you know, and my numbers will go up from here.
Gold price is skyrocketing.
And wow, yeah, I'm just,
I'm excited to go out there again tomorrow
and just sweep that ground up.
All I gotta do is just go out and get it.
Wow.
[narrator] There's a new leader in town,
while Mr. Gold falls to second place
and Kris Kelly inches up.
Next time...
We got neighbors closing in on me.
[narrator] ...on Bering Sea Gold...
This claim's starting to get real small.
Maybe Vern's gonna have a heart attack.
-[man 4] Whoo. -[man 5 laughing]
Are you ready to suck today's gold?
[John over radio] Yeah!
[Kris speaking]
It's working. It's working!
-[sputtering] -[Kris speaking]
It looks like this could be the end of this motor.
-We're in the money. -[Kris] Nothing's gonna stop us.
[John speaking]
[Kris over radio] Yeah!
-[machine stops] -[Kris speaking]
[Chris] Time to get some gold, baby.
Seven, eight...
Nice.
[Vernon] Looks like a nice pile there.