Hoppy has brought us out to where he believes is the actual location of the Lost Sans Saba mine,
where they hit a void at the spot we’re going to drill.

If they hit that void, that means that could be the Lost Sansaba mine.

Today, treasure hunters Rick, Marty, and Mattie Lagginina have joined forces with the fearless Hoppy Eubanks to unearth it.
Fueled by rumors, resistivity scans, and centuries-old whispers, this isn’t just another drill.
This is a full-blown race against rock, time, and mystery.

With geologist Kurt Champlain guiding the science, the team arrives at a remote location where it’s believed the Spanish once mined rich veins of silver and gold before the site vanished into history.
Now they’re drilling in the exact spot Kurt suspects hides a massive underground void, possibly the entrance to the lost Sans Saba mine.

If they’re right, that void could be the threshold to untold riches.
The rig roars to life, pounding into the earth six inches at a time.
As each drill pipe is forced downward, compressed air pushes spoil to the surface where Kurt and his team eagerly sift through it.

Something just came out.
“Oh, that was powdery.”
Still getting a good airflow.
“Yeah, it’s blowing. It’s definitely blowing.”

Their eyes search every inch. Clay, dirt, glass, leaves—any clue that might scream treasure.

At 40 ft, they hit dense clay.
At 55, strange air movements begin.
The team leans in. Something is different.

Suddenly, the drill loses circulation.
And no air, no spoils.
The crew stares at each other.

Could this mean what they hope?
A hidden cavity below, swallowing their airflow.
A lost chamber sealed for centuries, waiting to be rediscovered.

Moisture starts seeping through at 60 ft.
Not just any moisture.
Water trapped above a hard layer of rock.

Kurt lights up.
“That could be the capstone,” he says.
The very ceiling of the mine.

Their excitement builds.
This isn’t just drilling anymore.
This is discovery in motion.

As they push toward 65, then 70 ft, the drill spits out powdery material.
“That’s limestone!” someone shouts.

The airflow returns stronger, colder, and wetter.
The machine groans.
The earth is fighting back, revealing secrets only when forced.

Everyone freezes.
The last bucket rises from the depths.
Mud coats the rim.

And then, gleaming under layers of dirt: limestone.
Not sand, not clay, but hard, compact rock, just like the kind used to seal old Spanish mines.

This could be it.
After centuries lost and decades of speculation, they might be standing over the very edge of a buried treasure vault.

It’s not just rock anymore.
It’s a gateway, a whisper from the past, saying, “You’re close.”

And with hearts pounding, eyes wide, and drills still ready,
they know the treasure of Sans Saba might finally be within reach.

The ground beneath their boots still echoed from the San Saba drill.
Air bursting from voids, whispers of buried treasure rising with each spin of the bit.

But for Rick, Marty, and Matty Lagginina, the hunt didn’t stop in Texas.
Back on Oak Island, another mystery waited.
One potentially even older and far more infamous.

Because what lay beneath the garden shaft might be the original money pit.
Marty Lagginina said it himself:
This wasn’t just another tunnel.
This was the closest man-made link to the truth they’d ever touched.

Decades of searching, scanning, and speculation had brought them here.
Signs were growing stronger.
Either this was the original money pit or it was resting right beside it.

But this time, they weren’t just drilling toward the mystery.
They were stepping into it, with new 8-ft timber sets reinforcing the shaft.
The team was now driving deeper than ever toward a planned depth of 80 ft.

But depth wasn’t the milestone anymore.
Access was—for the first time in modern Oak Island history.
They had a plan to go in to explore from within.

Enter the Inuktune Spectrum, a high-tech 120-camera device capable of panning, zooming, and navigating the tight, damp tunnels below.
Like an underwater drone, it slipped down the shaft like a probe into an ancient tomb, revealing sights no human had ever seen.

Compact passageways, glistening stone, and walls engineered with intent.
Scott Barlo stared at the live feed, wide-eyed.
It wasn’t just old.
It was designed carefully, deliberately.

And then the moment history had been waiting for.
Rick Lagginina, the man whose obsession with Oak Island began as a 10-year-old boy flipping through Reader’s Digest, dawned his gear: helmet, coveralls, safety harness.
The rebuilt shaft had passed all checks.

For the first time in his life, Rick descended into the depths of the very mystery that had shaped his soul.

It wasn’t cinematic.
There was no gold in sight, but it was thunderous in meaning.
Rick stepped off the ladder and touched down into the garden shaft, into time itself.

He moved cautiously, brushing clay from walls built by unknown hands centuries ago.
Original timbers untouched by the modern world surrounded him.
The air was thick—not just with moisture, but with history.

Reverence filled his voice.
This wasn’t just treasure hunting anymore.
This was archaeology, legacy, proof

Roger Forton pointed out the untouched material, ancient wood sealed and preserved beneath newer reinforcements.
They weren’t standing in a myth.
They were standing in the work of men.
Men who had hidden something long ago for reasons still unclear.

Oak Island had finally opened its mouth, and Rick Lagginina had stepped inside.
It was deep, and it had survived.

At that level, around 50 ft, Rick and his team began knocking against the wood,
listening, feeling, testing for hollows, for tunnels, for chambers.
Every knock was a question.
Every echo, a possible answer.

And then the shaft reached 93 ft.
That’s when everything nearly stopped.

“Pull the bits and see what’s down there. What do you guys think? I do it before we run out of time.”
Okay.

Yes.

The probe drilling crew hit resistance.
Not rock, not collapse.
Wood.
The bit jammed.
Something was there.

They stopped the drill, cleared the filings, brought up the rods.
Bags were collected, examined, and sifted.
Not much came up, just debris.

But the drilling foreman said something no one could ignore.
He was 99.9% certain they hit a wooden structure on the north side of the shaft.

A race against time.
Oak Island has always been unforgiving.
It doesn’t care how long you’ve searched or how much you’ve sacrificed.
It buries what it wants to keep.
And when it gives you a clue, it takes something else back.

That’s exactly what happened next.
Just when the team had something real, something measurable, detectable,
they were told to stop.

Time had run out.
The permits to dig deeper weren’t in place.
The season was ending.
The shaft could not be extended further.
Not without risking lives and the entire future of the project.

And that’s what made this moment almost unbearable.
They had the signal.
They had the tech, but they couldn’t break through.
Not yet.

The team was frozen at the edge of discovery.
Rick stood there scanning the bottom of the garden shaft.
Gary’s detector still chirping in his mind.
That one unmistakable tone screaming possibility.

He had waited his entire life for that sound.
Now it echoed through his thoughts with one cruel message:
“You’re too late.”

But Oak Island doesn’t just taunt.
It dares.

If they couldn’t go deeper, they had to get smarter.
And that’s when the brothers took a different kind of step.
Not down, but inward.
They turned to analysis, planning, projection.

This wasn’t over.

What Gary Drayton had found was no fluke.
His CTX3030 was built for harsh environments.
It filtered out modern clutter.
It told the difference between iron and treasure.

That’s why the signal below the shaft mattered so much.
It wasn’t scrap.
It wasn’t trash.
It was something valuable buried just beyond reach.

The search area was small, tight, confined to a muddy base, surrounded by thick timbers.
But those signals, those beeps, weren’t scattered.
They were focused, clustered in one place, which meant something was there.

The team’s options were now limited.
But the clues weren’t.

They re-examined water samples taken near the same level where the hit occurred.
High traces of gold and silver.
That wasn’t wishful thinking.
That was lab-tested evidence.
And it wasn’t from the outside world.
It was coming from somewhere below.

Something was leeching metal into the groundwater.
Not flakes, not dust, solid concentrations.

Now combine that with the wood the drill had struck earlier.
The same drill that was supposed to breach a tunnel running westward toward a place they called the “baby blob,”
a zone marked by previous scans as a potential treasure chamber.

That tunnel was there.
The drill confirmed it.
The shaft was sitting right on its edge.
They had missed the entry by inches.

So now a new plan was taking shape.

“Well, where does Muckness treasure, mate? We’ll see what’s down there, mate.”

Rick and Marty returned to the shaft one final time that season.
Not with tools, but with intent.

They suited up, climbed down, and stood on history’s edge one more time.
It was cold, wet, and powerful.

They looked around the base of the shaft, not as searchers anymore, but as witnesses.
They weren’t guessing.
They were confirming the timbers underfoot were original, centuries old.

The structural preservation down there was shocking, like time had slowed, sealed in mud in silence.
Rick reached out and tapped the wood walls.
Hollow, not everywhere, just in spots, but enough to raise their pulses.

They knocked again, harder.
Same result.
There were gaps behind the shaft, spaces that weren’t part of the dig.

Natural voids don’t echo like that.
This was made, designed, built for what nobody knew.
But the answer had to be close.

Then came the final act of the season.
Gary Drayton descended once more into the garden shaft.
This time with the entire team watching.

Everyone knew this was their last chance, at least until next spring.
Gary’s detector swept slowly, carefully.
The unit beeped again.
Same spot, same signal.

A non-ferris hit.
Metallic, stable, solid.
It could be gold, it could be silver, it could be both.

But there was no way to dig.
Not yet.
Not safely.

The emotion in the shaft was thick.
Gary stood with Rick and Marty, surrounded by packed mud and century-old beams.
With the detector humming quietly in his hand, they were there, beneath the surface, beyond the map.

Oak Island doesn’t forget.
It waits.
It challenges.
And when it finally reveals a piece of itself, it demands something back:
Time, sweat, or sanity.

The garden shaft was now more than just a reconstructed access point.
It was a gateway, a wound in the island’s surface, a place where the past was bleeding through.

And the signals from below weren’t going away.
Gary Drayton’s metal detector wasn’t just hitting random bits of debris.
His CTX3030 was calibrated, tuned, and specialized to ignore noise.

So when it chirped loud and clear at the base of the shaft,
it meant something real was down there.

Non-ferris, buried deep and old.
Rick and Marty stood on those thick planks, feeling every vibration,
knowing they were surrounded by history, possibly treasure, and unable to touch it.

This wasn’t a story anymore.
It was a clock ticking.

With the season shutting down, the brothers made their final descent into the garden shaft together.
Sixty years after Rick first read about the island as a 10-year-old,
he and Marty stood shoulder-to-shoulder underground, surrounded by timber older than their country’s founding.

It wasn’t nostalgia.
It was personal.

This was the place where generations of men had bled, lost fortunes, and disappeared.
And now the Lagginas were staring into the same darkness those before them had faced.
With better tools, yes, but the same hunger.

“We are at the base of the old shaft. And if those guys dropped anything, it’s here.”

Oh yeah.
The structure beneath their boots told a silent story.
The timbers weren’t random.
They were arranged, cut, laid with intention.

This wasn’t a collapse.
It was a construction.
The kind only created when someone is trying to hide something forever.

And then came the detail that tightened every breath.
According to the shaft crew, everything below the newly installed supports—
the stuff Rick and Marty were now standing on—was original, untouched, preserved in muck, packed with clay, hidden from air and light for hundreds of years.

It was a time capsule.
And not just for tools, bones, or maps.
Possibly for treasure.

Now, think about this.
All year long, the team had drilled in the Money Pit region using data from sonar and seismic scans.
They tracked voids, tunnels, and anomalies.

One of those anomalies, marked at approximately 95 ft, was believed to be a chamber.
A tunnel led toward it.
That tunnel, based on coordinates, ran westward from the exact area where the garden shaft sat.
That wasn’t a coincidence.

They had hit the edge of that tunnel.
That’s what stopped the drill.
That’s what triggered the detector.
And that’s where the season ended.

But even with operations paused, the mines behind Oak Island didn’t rest.
They gathered, recalibrated, and reviewed every frame of footage, every sample, every echo.

They weren’t going to make the same mistake next season.
This time, they wouldn’t drill beside the tunnel.
They would drill into it.

And that meant preparing now, while the snow fell, while the mud froze, while the permits were secured.

This wasn’t about waiting.
It was about precision.
Because that single target—the metallic signal beneath the shaft—wasn’t alone.

Further scans revealed that multiple zones in the area showed potential metal content,
not just in water, but embedded in the soil.

The term the team used was “gold signature.”
And those signatures were concentrated, not scattered.
That suggested containment, possibly even storage.

What they were seeing was not natural.
That was enough to reignite every theory—from the Templar Knights to Spanish galleons to Masonic vaults.

For the team, it didn’t matter what name history had attached to it.
What mattered was that it was there.

And now, the garden shaft wasn’t just an exploratory zone.
It was an access point.
A launchpad.

When the Dumas team packed up and left the island,
they didn’t leave behind just equipment.
They left behind the most advanced underground infrastructure Oak Island had seen in its modern era.

A stabilized shaft reinforced to 80 ft, with the potential to breach laterally into nearby chambers.

In other words, when the crew returned in spring, they wouldn’t start over.
They would resume.

Every set, every beam, every support,
they were left in place, waiting like the island itself.

Everything had built up to this.
Decades of searching, centuries of obsession,
and now the clues weren’t carved into old maps or passed down through sailor’s tales.
They were buried under the boots of the team that had come closer than anyone else in Oak Island’s recorded history.

That small shadowed outline seen on the camera—
it wasn’t just a shape.
It was a promise.

A promise that something crafted, concealed, preserved, waited just beneath the lowest point of the garden shaft.

The only thing separating the team from that object was a few feet of packed muck and rotting time.

The question was never again if there was something down there.
The question was what, and what would happen when it finally saw the light of day.

But Oak Island doesn’t give anything without a test.
As the final days of the season drew to a close, the team had to shut down operations.
Legal limits, weather, safety, and time—always time—had the final word.

So, they walked away.

But this time, not empty-handed.
They had the shaft.
They had the hit.
They had the gold traces.
They had the wood struck by the drill.
And they had that unmistakable rectangular image caught by the high-def camera, just resting beneath their feet.

There were other years where they paused with frustration.
This year they paused with fire.
And so they prepared for the return.

Winter wasn’t a break.
It was a buildup.

The garden shaft would become the launch point for a full subterranean assault.
Plans were made to probe deeper, to drill directly into the suspected box-shaped anomaly.

Gary Drayton’s CTX3030 detector would be upgraded with water-capable coils.
If there were metals—precious ones—they would not be missed again.

And for the first time, the team wasn’t working in scattered directions across the island.
The search had focused itself like a laser.
Everything pointed back to the same point: the base of the garden shaft.

Every map, every reading, every sample—
all roads led down.

Even Marty, who had always leaned more toward practical engineering than romantic ideas of buried treasure, said it clearly:
The data no longer lied.

There was something deliberate beneath the shaft.
Something planned, built, hidden.
And now they had the tools to expose it.

Plans included drilling horizontally from the shaft at strategic depths:
55 ft, where water samples showed high gold content;
93 ft, where the drill had struck wood;
100 ft, just beyond where the shadowy object sat in the mud.

Those bore holes wouldn’t just search.
They would see.

Equipped with fiber-optic cameras and robotic probes, the next operation would not simply dig.
It would explore.

This wasn’t about guesses anymore.
This was reconnaissance.
A deep operation that would run not just vertically, but sideways,
creating a network of eyes underground, scanning for cavities, artifacts, and signs of man-made engineering.

The idea wasn’t just to locate.
It was to confirm.
They were now in the verification phase of the world’s most famous treasure hunt.

And that’s when something even more surprising happened.
That little five pages—that’s where the journey started.
And this is decades in the making.

The Canadian authorities, recognizing the scope and historical value of the shaft reconstruction and the data gathered,
granted provisional permissions for advanced underground investigation.

Meaning the team wouldn’t have to wait another full season to act.
They could begin groundwork the moment the thaw allowed.

For Rick, that was more than good news.
It was a green light.

He was already lining up the team:
Dumas drillers, scanning specialists, geologists, and artifact handlers.

The shaft wouldn’t just be explored.
It would be logged, scanned, filmed, and analyzed in real time.
Nothing would be missed.

Even local First Nations groups were consulted, brought in to ensure historical sensitivities were honored.

Because now, more than ever, the team knew this was bigger than just treasure.
It was history.

And if that rectangular outline turned out to be a box, an actual container,
then the implications were enormous.
Not just for Oak Island lore, but for archaeology, for global historical narratives.

The final war room of the year wasn’t somber.
It wasn’t even reflective.
It was electric.

Rick stood up and spoke not about closure, but about chapters.
He reminded the team that the story didn’t begin with them, but it might end with them.

Could this finally be the moment Oak Island gives up its greatest answer?
Or will the Shaft’s next chapter reveal something even bigger?
Something the world isn’t ready for?

Tell us what you think, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more.