'Gold Rush: White Water' Season 3 Episode 5 sees 'Dakota' Fred exonerated, malfunctions galore haunt Dustin
Episode 5 of the Discovery Channel docu-series ‘Gold Rush: White Water’ season 3 saw the crews encounter some visibility issues. The water at ‘Dakota’ Fred Hurt’s “Two Fish” claim in Alaska’s Chilkat range was filled with silt, rendering their dives for gold ineffective because the diver couldn’t see anything at all.
With only a quarter of an ounce of gold in their possession so far, Fred’s team needed to buck up, especially because they were already in the seventh week of this 20-week mining season.
Things on Dustin Hurt’s claim “Rainbow’s End” was, on the other hand, smoother. In the previous episode, Dustin and his crew discovered they had already recovered almost an ounce of gold flecks from the white waters.
Confidence was thus high. But all was not well. In the cold Alaskan waters, divers need to be artificially heated through steam pumps in order to make sure they don’t get hypothermia. And as luck would have it, their heating equipment began malfunctioning.
But that wasn’t all. Crew member James Hamm got second-degree chemical burns on his lower back from the soap he used to clean his diving suit. Even though they faced some setbacks because of Hamm’s injury, the morale at Dustin’s camp was nothing compared to how low it was back at Fred’s.
‘Dakota’ Fred’s crew seemed to be losing faith in their soon-to-be 76-year-old leader. They confronted him about changing their spot, perhaps, hoping to have better luck in a different part of the creek, upstream.
Ultimately, they came to a sort of truce: They would give Fred one more day to prove that the present location would yield more gold. If it didn’t, they’d move. But Fred was determined to find a pocket of gold under a huge boulder under the water. And his gambit paid off.
Once they removed the boulder with their winch system, they found a few chunks of gold, only proving that there was more to be found the deeper they dug. A quarter of a mile upstream, despite being down a man, Dustin was determined not to stop.
He decided to man both dredges himself in an attempt to not slow their momentum down. But luck just seemed to elude him. After the heating equipment malfunction, now the air supply equipment began experiencing trouble. And if that wasn't bad enough, one of the vacuum pipes in the dredges developed a blockage.
‘Gold Rush: White Water’ Season 3 airs on the Discovery Channel every Sunday at 10 p.m. ET.