Rick and Marty Lagina’s ongoing quest to unearth Oak Island’s legendary secrets and treasures, documented on The HISTORY Channel®’s hit show The Curse of Oak Island, makes for riveting, entertaining and occasionally nerve-wracking TV. The island’s Nova Scotia location and archeological dig sites pose unique challenges for cast and crew. Two executive producers—showrunner Jon Levy and Joe Lessard (who also co-owns Prometheus Entertainment, the production company behind the show)—say the real curse of Oak Island may be the extreme weather and rugged terrain.
What time of year do you typically shoot on Oak Island?
Lessard: [Rick and Marty] like to get there around late May and work until it gets pretty brutal, usually about the beginning of November. But in our second year, we went up in February to scan the swamp with metal-detecting equipment. The only way to do that, pragmatically, at the time was when it was covered with ice, so we went up in the dead of February to shoot for a week. It was subzero every day, [with a] nasty wind chill and really cutting winds.
What goes into an average shoot?
Lessard:We have audio guys [following the cast], and Jon is leading the charge in the field. He’s got two main producing partners. There are multiple things happening everywhere: archeology going on at sites, digs in the swamp, there’s always Money Pit activity—[the Money Pit is a more than 100-feet deep shaft located on the east side of the island]—and metal detecting can be going on anywhere on the island. All simultaneously.
Levy: We try to be at every place as they’re actually searching for the treasure, so usually five to seven cameras—GoPros everywhere, and other specialty cameras. We shoot about three terabytes of footage a day.
What’s most challenging about filming on the island?
Lessard: Everything about Oak Island is challenging. Extreme elements due to its geographic location in the North Atlantic—The Maritimes.
When we first went there, we were a skeleton crew, not knowing what we were getting into, not knowing how this story was going to evolve. We dealt with trying to film in the winter, which was brutal… There are all kinds of things to navigate, whether it’s weather or creepy crawlies.
Levy: Just because the weather gets bad doesn’t mean we stop shooting. The best time to go metal detecting is in the rain, which makes the ground more conductive for the metals. Over the years, we’ve even dealt with hurricanes.
Which areas are trickiest to film in?
Lessard: The hardest on a daily basis is the swamp. They’re finding all kinds of manmade things in the swamp, but it’s literally like trying to search in cake batter that smells horrible.
Levy: It’s almost a rite of passage for everybody who works on Oak Island to fall into the swamp. But we’re as safe as possible.
When we’re digging in the Money Pit, we have giant caissons and lots of heavy equipment all around, so we have a safety team in place to make sure we’re safe. It’s loud, too, so we definitely have to pay attention to everything around us.
Lessard: We follow the [safety] protocols of industry professionals who do this kind of work. Everybody gets trained and gets physical protective gear.
Any wildlife encounters during production?
Levy: As far as critters go, the worst thing we encounter, truthfully, is ticks. There are no bears in the area, thankfully. No wolves or any big game. Just ticks and mosquitoes—and lots of deer.
Lessard: And an occasional fox, although we haven’t seen them in a while. In the waters, more and more, are great white sharks.
Have you ever been scared while working on location?
Lessard: Having professional diver John Chatterton go down a 27-inch-wide hole, 200 feet underground, with a hose so he can breathe mixed air—he has to breathe helium and oxygen so he doesn’t get the bends. He’s down there navigating a 10-foot chamber at the bottom of 10X [a 235-foot shaft northeast of the Money Pit], and three quarters of the way down, he alerts us that he’s stuck.
I’m sitting there in a shed, looking at his monitor feed, hyperventilating and praying. Then you hear him say, ‘It’s all good. I’m free now. Never mind.’
Levy: I believe it was season four or five. We were using a rotary drill rig and the high-pressure hose broke. It snapped and one of the drillers almost got seriously hurt. We covered it in the show, using the specialty cameras. But it was definitely the scariest moment on the show for me.
What are your favorite finds, to date?
Levy: The thing that made me think the mystery is real was when they were digging Caisson H-8 and found a little bit of human bone 155 feet down in the Money Pit. There were no recorded deaths of searchers dying in the money pit. To me, that was like, ‘Aha. The treasure is real!’
Lessard: One of the coolest moments of the entire series was [in Season one]. In the swamp they found a Spanish coin with the year 1652 on it. They went right to the home of Dan Blankenship—their elder and partner who’d been on the island almost 50 years. Even though Dan had found a lot of evidence of man-made workings, he’d never actually held a piece of what you would consider pirate treasure in his hands. That was a moment Rick and Marty got to share with him.
The other big one—I was not there personally to witness it—was when they found the little lead cross at Smith’s Cove. They were able to determine scientifically it was probably made from lead that came from France in the 14th century, which was like [Knights] Templar haven.
Two weeks before, Rick had been in southern France at a building used to imprison members of the Knights Templar who were persecuted by the Catholic Church in the early 14th century. He saw the exact design carved into the wall. It was a known Templar carving. Then he comes home and finds that cross on the beach. An exact match. That’s one of the most serendipitous things ever.