Episode 2: Getting to the Bottom of It

As questions surrounding the Stinky Beach discovery deepen, the investigation plunges into the water. Divers, underwater drones, shifting tides, and a mysterious scour hole beneath Ocean City’s inlet begin revealing just how difficult it may be to recover the truth once something disappears beneath the water. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:06

If you want to get to the bottom of something and you're tenacious about it, you jump right into it. Today, on the beach remains, I'm Ricky Conlin. Episode two. Getting to the bottom of it. Ocean City. Two bone findings. Same spot. Two years apart. What was the story? That's what I found myself asking over and over and over again. Same place. That was the single common element. Different bones were found at different times, at the same place. Step number one of my investigation was to get to know Stinky Beach. I wanted to get on the sand and in the water. I wanted to get to know the neighborhood, the immediate area, its people, its history. Step number two were the bones. While 2016's collected evidence to that date was a picture, there was still the possibility of further investigating what might have been lost in the water in 2018. In 2021, all paths led to Stinky Beach. I needed to get there. Throughout the first half of 2021, I did just that multiple times. My investigative partner, Rob Wirts, accompanied me for a few of the trips. Yeah. We generally spoke to as many different people as we could.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

It's the weirdest thing you've ever seen out here.

SPEAKER_06 2:27

Not really.

SPEAKER_04 2:28

Nothing.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Rob's investigative style was not quite as subtle as mine. I spoke to 20 plus people over the course of my various field trips to Stinky Beach. Most everyone was friendly. There were fishermen, casual beachgoers, and even the occasional treasure hunter with a metal detector. The majority of the people that I spoke with were local, but not from the neighborhood immediately adjacent to Stinky Beach. As luck would have it, the first person that I met that actually lived in the neighborhood of Stinky Beach was Fritz Piler. To the locals around town, Fritz has long been known as the mayor of Stinky Beach. Fritz grew up at Stinky Beach, and he's lived there for a long time.

SPEAKER_08 3:18

I've been coming here ever since I was golly, probably about six years old. We rented a house that we now own long before I moved down here permanently. And that was probably about 1958, or up to about 1959, and in 63 we bought the whole property. We lived here every weekend since about 1958. In 63, we moved down here full-time.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

Fritz also provides an excellent explanation on how Stinky Beach came to get its name.

SPEAKER_08 3:53

Back in the day before it all eroded, there was little marsh islands out in front of Stinky Beach with marsh grass going on it and mussels and everything, uh, little hermit crabs. And a lot of times during low tide, the sun would come out and it would cause this mud island to start stinking. And also on the fish docks, a lot of times they'd clean the heads off and just chuck them overboard at the docks. And on the incoming tide, the fish heads would come back on onto the beach and lay there in the hot sun, and they would be ripe. I mean, they would be stinking.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

Fritz remembers Stinky Beach as a different place. In the early 60s, it was still a marshland, home mostly to Ocean City's black service workers, still then living in segregation. But it was a close-knit community where fishing and baseball in the dunes filled happy dates. The docks were alive back then.

SPEAKER_08 4:57

We'd get a phone call from Pinky Park, and Pinky would say, Can you come over and help us unload clams and do a little boxing up of the fish? And you know, all the local kids down here, the black kids, we'd go over there and me, I was a token white kid, and I'd I'd get on the dock and we'd take a sip of gin and we'd work until one or two o'clock at night.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

But even more than boyhood baseball games and teenage gin swigs, what Fritz most remembers about Stinky Beach was the tight sense of community and what he learned growing up there.

SPEAKER_08 5:31

It was family-oriented neighborhood. It wasn't black, it wasn't white, it was just family.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

For Fritz, the docks weren't just work, they were family. When Fritz was 21, his father passed.

SPEAKER_08 5:48

And I was still working over at the docks, and the guys all knew my father passed away. So they kind of threw the umbrella over me and said, you know, we got your back.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

A community still stinging in times of prejudice was the very first to offer belonging. If there was one lesson that stuck, it was this.

SPEAKER_08 6:09

Be kind. Kill them with kindness, and it'll come back. It's a karma thing.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Fritz stayed in the neighborhood. He raised his own family there. He lives in the same house his parents bought in 1963. And his son and family still live in the neighborhood. The view from Stinky Beach of the Ocean Inlet, Splitting, Ocean City, and Asteteague Islands remains, as does the skyline view of the boardwalk across the bay. Dominating the skyline view are the boardwalk rides of trimpers, the largest ride being the daunting tidal wave roller coaster, a bravery test for generations of mid-Atlantic children. The tidal wave, along with the other many rides of the boardwalk, were maintained by Fritz. He's shown me personally newspaper clippings with pictures of him scaling the top of the 100-foot plus tracks of the tidal wave. Fritz no longer scales the tracks of the tidal wave anymore. And plenty else has changed about Stinky Beach.

SPEAKER_08 7:19

But it's changed now. It was kind of like Stinky Beach. All the real people have either passed away or they've been filled in with people that are come here. You know, they come here to live because it's so nice. And there are so many people coming here now that also the crime is coming with them.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

I heard similar feelings expressed by the other locals I interviewed. Remember what we heard from Rob in the last episode.

SPEAKER_03 7:56

It can be a family-friendly resort, which is what its main, I guess, slogan has been for some time. But it's not. Here's Fritz.

SPEAKER_08 8:06

They want to try to say that it's a family-oriented town. Well, a lot of the families are afraid to go on the boardwalk at night.

SPEAKER_02 8:16

But today, that world feels fragile. Fritz voices a fear shared by many. That ocean city's authenticity is slipping away. The old charm scraped off, replaced by high rises in hotels. As he puts it.

SPEAKER_08 8:38

Things are so expensive that you could go to Disneyland cheaper than Income Nation City.

SPEAKER_02 8:45

What was once a modest fishing village with shanties and small homes along the bay has become a neighborhood of multi-million dollar properties, many owned by part-time outsiders. Yet even here, some things endure. Amid the luxury homes, the dunes, and the shorelines of Homer Godalsky Park still hold the sand of Sticky Beach. The beach remains. In my interviews and findings of episode one, we established the possibility that the original suitcase reported and found may have remained underwater and unobserved between the initial 911 call filed outside of the vicinity of the supposed suitcase to the time the state divers entered the water, well over six hours later. We also discussed how the circumstance of time gap may also open the possibility of the suitcase getting dislodged and carried out of the area by the current before divers had the chance to hunt for it. To me, it was fundamentally important to get on the sand and in the water at Stinky Beach. My first impression of Stinky Beach was that it was nice, quiet, but almost always occupied. At a minimum, there were one or two treasure hunters on the sand with metal detectors almost every time we came into town.

SPEAKER_04 10:16

Okay. What's the coolest thing? Do you come here often? Yeah. Okay. What's the coolest thing you ever found?

SPEAKER_02 10:22

And coins and fishing lures weren't the only thing littering the sands of Stinky Beach.

SPEAKER_04 10:27

In just a cursory search, we were able to find bones. Found several what look like deer bones. Deer leg bones. So it wasn't hard to find bones, and it wasn't hard to identify them as animal versus human. Right up there in the in that little section of grass, marsh grass, there are some more bones that it looks like fish bones, big fish. But the point is there are bones here.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

So the sands of Stinky Beach were clean, but littered with natural debris and the lost coins and fishing gear of the inlet and bay. The majority of what washed in with debris was at the end of the riprap, i.e., piles of stones placed in the sand to prevent erosion. The current riprap extends over half of the shoreline. Where it stops is where swimmers are permitted to enter the water. At the end of the riprap is also the epicenter of a tidal effect, fed by currents that are particularly strong in high tide. This portion of the beach is the area where the majority of debris spewed onto it. Also nearby is the log we heard about in episode one. Here's the 911 call from the 2018 incident.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

There's a big piece of wood sitting on the beach, okay?

SPEAKER_00 11:55

And we sat whatever we found right next to the big piece of wood, and then the suitcase was directly out from the.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

Also, remember what we heard from photojournalist Megan Raymond.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

Police officer is sitting on a it looked like a log.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

The large sitting log was the one visual reference point we had from the incident. After careful study of the several pictures we received and collected from Megan, media from the day of the incident, and witness testimony, we were able to target a specific and referenceable area of water to examine. So yeah, so this is roughly the area, yep, right?

SPEAKER_04 12:36

Yeah, we're there because there's that uh telephone pole that marks where the police were.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

We repeatedly honed in on this area. Like 20, 20, 25 yards. Yeah. We also took note of the more deeply dug boat channels in the area. Some newly dug since 2018. So if they're looking in the channel, just there's a lot to get lost out there.

SPEAKER_04 13:03

Just you know what I mean? It's not just one flat, perfectly sloped shoreline from here to that bridge. It it's there's undulation to it, there's a channel in the middle of it. It could things could easily be lost and swept away.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Getting in the water helped us replicate the witness experience in 2018 and triangulate an estimated location to where the suitcase slash barrel was discovered. W one thing that's odd to me, Rob, is and I guess, you know, if you had if you had your swimsuit on, you would walk. I I can't imagine anybody like unless they were swimming, it sounded like they were taking a walk, but like the couple couldn't have waited that far in. I mean, it's it's I think it's lowish tide now. Um if you're in shin to waist deep water, you know, you're not going very far. Like you're chest deep out there in probably 10 yards or less. Rob and I spent months researching the best approximation of the 2018 incident. Over time, we felt more and more confident that we knew where to look. We also felt like we captured the major physical factors facing the witnesses, investigating police forces, and most importantly, the suitcase slash barrel. First, the water was brackish and entirely dark in depths of greater than four feet. Then there was the dynamic floor of the inlet, with rapid depth changes in spots, multiple man-dredged boat channels, and a sandy bottom littered with natural debris. Third, the tide was a factor. There were constant and powerful currents produced as the ocean and the bay traded salt water throughout any given day. Last but certainly not least was the 50-foot deep hole existing 100 yards from our identified area of interests and a mere 30 yards off Homer Gadalsky Park's nearest rip rap. This nautical phenomena is otherwise known as a scour hole.

SPEAKER_04 15:17

Who's that scour hole? It's out here. It was right here.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

No, it's right here.

SPEAKER_04 15:22

It's not turning today, though.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

No, man, we were out here last week. That thing was frothing like a qu like a cauldron. A scour hole is caused by long-term erosion in an area where previous inlet floor and bank material were moved. In this case, where an old bridge pylon from a since extinct bridge that formerly connected the current Homer Gadolski Park to Ocean City in the pre-1940s. It has since eroded into a hole big enough to fit an entire tractor trailer. The scour hole was something that we wanted to understand better. So we reached out to the Army Corps of Engineers. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Baltimore District is responsible for the planning, maintaining, and preserving of the Ocean City inlet and its aquatic topography.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

My name's uh Andrew Roach. I'm a project manager with the uh U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uh Baltimore District. And I've been uh the project manager for our uh uh continuing authorities program section 204, which is beneficial use of dredge material, uh a project with uh the scourhole at Homer Gandalfski Park for the past about uh about four years now. And I've been with the Corps of Engineers uh since 2007. Uh prior to that, um I actually worked for uh the National Park Service at Assateague Island National Seashore. So uh familiar with uh with the area with the uh ocean city inlet uh for a good number of years now.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Andrew's decades of familiarity with not only the Ocean City Inlet, but also Assateague Island made him the perfect scouting report and data resource for the dives ahead of us. My initial questions of Andrew revolve around understanding the best known and recorded dimensions of the scour hole to date. What is the depth that you guys have observed as as you know most recently of that scour hole?

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Sure. So the depth that we've been seeing is approximate like around 50 to 52 feet um deep at NAVD88. So it all depends on the datum that you're looking at as well.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

52 feet deep. And as for the width? Up to, I think approximately around 150 feet. To rehash, the Army Corps of Engineers just verified the existence of a 50-foot deep, 150-foot-wide scour hole less than 30 yards from the shore, and about 100 yards from a site known for multiple bone findings. This seemed like a significant detail, but we had never seen it mentioned in any of the former police reports around the incident, nor did we see it reported by any of the local media outlets. I asked Andrew to describe the dynamics within the scour hole.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Well, it's certainly a dynamic area. So we've got a lot of sediment moving around there. Um, you know, currents are very strong. And getting back to your question about the uh the strength of the currents around the scour hole, what we're seeing there is probably almost about five feet a second at its strongest within there.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

For those wondering, that speed translates to roughly four knots. The dark sediment mentioned also seems potentially important, as several on scene witnesses described recovered items they observed as either being burnt or blackened in appearance. This current, when powerful enough, can kick up what's trapped in the depths of the scour hole. I witnessed this several times when, after storms, the beach edge of the riprap would be covered by the same dark sediment Andrew Roach described at the bottom of the scour hole. Last question on the scour hole itself. I I know that there's been talk about uh filling that eventually. And I'm sure COVID and other circumstances has has affected that. Um, are there any, I assume there's still some some level of planning for filling that in. Do you know if that's been updated or there's any sense of of when and if that's going to be filled?

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Yeah, we're still looking at you know options for uh you know, options and measures to address the scour hole. And we're uh completing a feasibility study and environmental assessment to uh you know to look at that right now. And at this point, the preferred alternative uh would be to utilize dredge material to fill the scour hole up to about the you know the surrounding uh level of the bay bottom, and then cap that area with uh with a non-erodable material, probably uh something like uh a marine mattress.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

They're in the process of planning the fill-in on our scour hole of interest. Andrew Roach is the project manager of this effort. Whatever may be trapped within the scour hole may be soon trapped forever. There was an exponentially building sense of urgency. I needed to get in the scour hole ASAP, and I needed to find professional help because this dive was gonna be anything but run of the mill. Uh are you aware of any divers on the core of engineer side or otherwise to be able to get in there or observe anything?

SPEAKER_00 20:50

No, no, not not that I'm aware of. I mean, we've uh I think the closest we've gotten is just having our survey teams you know out in that area with uh hydrographic surveying, but no diving in that area.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

Just grabbing material remotely has proven itself difficult.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

I know our researchers had some issues just trying to get grab samples of the sediment from the bottom of the area. Um, you know, there's both difficult, I think, because you're hitting that that hard, non-erodable uh material and also just difficult due to the currents.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

And then there's the constant dredging and channel change coupled with the intensity of ocean currents. This creates an intense and unpredictable push and pull for divers andor equipment. My discussions with Andrew verified and quantified the hazards of the scour hole dive ahead. I quickly determined that I needed advice from divers both familiar and comfortable with dangerous dive environments. As a Naval Academy alum and a former naval officer, I've had the privilege. Of knowing and befriending several current and former members of the Naval Special Warfare and Special Operations community. This community represents some of the most skilled, knowledgeable, and courageous divers on the planet. Several members of my personal network quickly came to my aid and gave very solid advice. One such contact couldn't wait to get into the water.

SPEAKER_05 22:28

My name is Captain Ben Sipperly. So I'm a captain in the United States Navy. I'm an explosive ordnance disposal officer by training. I started off my experience kind of in the ocean environment. I was an ocean engineer at the Naval Academy. So did a lot of work on ocean environments, did a lot of work on bottom topography, did a lot of work on current effects. Um partly that into a 23-year Navy career in explosive ordnance disposal. So I've had the opportunity to be in water environments all over the planet. I've dove in every environment from rivers on the East Coast, uh, you know, fast-moving rivers to open ocean and everything in between.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

I sent Ben an email about our investigation on a Tuesday. By that Saturday, he and I were in the water with fins on, ready to get after it.

SPEAKER_05 23:16

The water will want to do is it'll want to bend around that breakwater into here. You can see it a little bit, right? So if you look at the direction the water's traveling, yeah, as it comes around the breakwater, it turns. Right. So it's going that way, that way, that way, it hits that breakwater and it curls around, so it'll deposit a lot of this stuff in this area. If there's a hole right there that can drop it into, got it.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Does it would anything once it's in, it's in, right? Nothing's gonna kick that out. Not really. Yeah. When I showed up in Annapolis way back when, for indoctrination day, in my first day of plebe summer at the U.S. Naval Academy, Captain Ben Sipperley, who at that time 18 and fresh from Nebraska, was one of my first Naval Academy roommates. Two decades later, in an accomplished career as a Navy spec ops officer, Ben was as spirited and tenacious as ever. An email and a quick phone call, and suddenly we're catching up on old times, barreling over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in my pickup truck, and on our way to Ocean City. I asked Ben what his first impressions were after visiting Stinky Beach, a place he had only heard about what a week earlier.

SPEAKER_05 24:30

Um, there was a great dive that I used to do uh when we lived in South Carolina, right? Where we would dive for prehistoric shark's teeth because that area was underwater, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago. And, you know, it's pretty hard to get into those locations, right? You have to have a small boat that has, you know, capable of you know not drafting very deep, right? You have to you have to know where you're going. Um, and this was it surprised me in that this was so open. You know, there was you know people walking on the beach. I was surprised by how close it was to people.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

Ben and I arrived early in Ocean City that day and hung out a few hours in West Ocean City until we observed the lowest tide and our best dive window for the day.

SPEAKER_05 25:13

Pretty interesting, right? So the tidal range was pretty significant, even over a short period of time. You had, I mean, almost six additional feet, six to seven additional feet of beach were showing, and that was on a pretty significant beach gradient. Think about that, you know, 20 feet off the beach is where the channel is dug. You know, it went from you know a you know, a walkable beach to you know 10 feet from you know below the waterline, yeah, just in 20 feet. So that's a pretty steep beach gradient.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

We also scouted the area between the approximated suitcase slash barrel location and the 50-foot deep scour hole, roughly 100 yards away. Like I'd recommend to our listeners, Ben and I did not swim within 20 yards of the scour hole, instead, observing its outer perimeter, scouting what type of dive strategy and equipment would be required to see what might be sitting at the bottom of the scour hole, suitcase, barrel, or otherwise. As for the dive session that day, in the water, even with peak daylight, visibility wasn't great. What's your recollection? Like, once we got in the water, what do you think the visibility was? Just general sense. So, you know, at best three feet. And there were other aspects of the inlet water that needed to be taken seriously.

SPEAKER_05 26:39

The colder water will get you too. Umless you're in some kind of wetsuit and have, you know, either a propulsion vehicle or something like that, like spending a lot of time in current is exhausting. That's why it's yeah, it's so hard. And we don't recommend doing like even like the Navy Dive Manual says that you know, thou shalt not plan to dive the north of one knot of current. Just because it it you'll get burned out so fast. But you probably couldn't spend, even if you had a wetsuit and a full air tank, you probably couldn't spend more than 20 or 30 minutes in that area and try to hold yourself on station for any real effects.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

We use Ben's knowledge of currents to predict the possible scour hole debris movement pattern to focus our search within and along the scour hole perimeter. After discussing the police helicopter sweep, Ben explains the merits of the search from above and suggests I take aerial footage of the scour hole during a heavy current to get better scouting on where the ebb tide may be taking debris. A helicopter came in, looked around in another area, and then they went and dove in that area. So I just I assumed that the helicopter was just trying to scout for the bag because it did get relatively low when it came in. Sure.

SPEAKER_05 27:57

Yeah, and I mean some in some ways, like you can you can chart out like you know, the great thing about tides and currents is they're really predictable. And so you can, you know, if if you lost in uh you know something in one area and you generally knew how it would behave, like how fast it would sink, you can make predictions about where it would end up based on a certain amount of time. So I'm not sure if that was in their logic, but uh if you had an overhead sensor like that, like a helicopter, and you could see kind of how things were moving around, that may be opportunity that to do that.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

A week after the dive, my head was still spinning. The scour hole, sitting so close to the 2016 and 18 discovery sites, seemed almost certainly connected to what had washed ashore. It was even plausible that the bones and suitcase had spent time there before surfacing. Ben believed a tether dive was possible with the right conditions, but I felt it was too risky to rush. With the Army Corps of Engineers considering capping the scour hole, urgency pushed me toward a more plausible near-term planning unmanned submersibles. I spent a solid week researching and qualifying experienced underwater drone pilots. Within days, I had a short list of five. And by that afternoon, one was already on the phone with me.

SPEAKER_07 29:17

I am Nir Pair. I'm the uh CEO and founder of Inspired Intelligence. Uh, we are a small company that um deals with um unmanned systems, we deal with drones, light our equipment, and with underwater drones. Um the story started uh really um a good amount of years ago. Um I was actually my background is in uh military, law enforcement, and defense. Later on continue to work with unmanned systems. I would say more specialized and unique unmanned systems that used um with uh military applications and uh security applications.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

And his attitude and demeanor also caught our attention. The proposed dive's technical complexity is what kept me from attempting it myself.

SPEAKER_07 30:23

So when I heard Nier say Um we mainly deal with complicated projects, I pressed for details.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

He described a dive in the Delonica gold mine in Georgia, where his team piloted an underwater drone into flooded, pitch black tunnels unseen for a century, returning with remarkable images and video. After watching the footage, I knew complicated was an understatement. And I had found my drone driver. Even though living several states away, and in the midst of a cross-country move with his business partner and wife Amanda, he agreed to be on site within two weeks. Alright, so we're doing preparations right now for the dive. Um, just trying to find the exact location of the scour hole. Uh near Amanda are actually working the stone arm off of a fishing rod uh as we scout specifically the entry point of the location um of the scour hole. But uh that's probably gonna go down for we've been doing it for maybe 15-20 minutes just to get it the best scouting possible. Um hopefully another 20-30 minutes we'll be good to go and in the water. So fingers crossed, all systems go. Within 10 minutes, we have a targeted location locked in. And the sonar results. They don't disappoint. We continue to hit sonar. We've hit 71 uh or 70 plus at least three different times. Uh and the deepest thus far has been 77. And then Nir and Amanda are about ready to put the uh the drone in the water, and we are about ready to launch here. Diver in. The submersible drone is a technical thing of beauty. In the water, not only does it zip in the two knot plus surface current with ease, but it holds rock steady in it. Critical if we want to take meaningful video in the depths of the scour hole. NIR tests the drone's armature, validating the possibility of grabbing items. At this point, my heart is pumping. NIR guides the submersible via video remote while it remains attached to the shore via a hundred plus yards of flexible tether rope. Roughly the size of a large bed pillow and colored bright yellow, the drone might be our best and only shot at getting to the bottom of the scour hole. Yeah, I think you can get up and down quick.

SPEAKER_01 33:02

Yeah, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_07 33:04

I have to work all the time just to make sure I know where I'm at.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

Despite the challenge of low visibility and above average inlet current, the drone performs its first test dives capably. Near takes a few initial approach angles to see which gives him his best shot at descending to the middle of the conically shaped scour hole. And on just his third dive, we make our first legitimate run at the bottom of the scour hole. Was that current or something?

SPEAKER_07 33:39

Current or something.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Do you think it could be like a solid object of some sort?

SPEAKER_07 33:44

I don't know, but we basically right behind walks over there right there.

SPEAKER_02 33:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 33:51

Try to come back here.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

How how's did you get any deeper than 34 feet?

SPEAKER_07 33:56

Uh I think I got about 40.

SPEAKER_02 33:59

40, okay. In a matter of seconds, Nier successfully drops the drone over 40 feet deep into the scour hole. The drone apparently hits something beyond 40 feet and is instantly wrangled from Nier's control. Nir and Amanda race to save the disabled drone before it is sucked out to the ocean. After everyone catches their breath, I ask Nier what had just happened.

SPEAKER_07 34:26

I'm not sure what it was, but I can tell you it was instant. Instant, yeah. Instant.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Was it like a particular depth that you hit where the current got?

SPEAKER_07 34:35

It was probably around 36 feet.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

We just tossed it off completely off our trajectory.

SPEAKER_07 34:42

Yeah, and and what happened here is strange because we usually have this uh battery hooked up around this.

SPEAKER_06 34:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 34:53

And when we pulled the drone out of the water, this was completely outside of the so it must have hit it pretty hard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

After the excitement of nearly losing our drone within the first 15 minutes of being in the water, Niran Amanda didn't give up. Unfortunately, the tide and current increased with the forthcoming storm, visiting in a few hours. Uh the current is pulling the drone definitely right to left here. We made a total of 20 dives on day one. We got a handful deeper than 30 feet, and one of those trips included a collision with something at the bottom. We'd theoretically have video of all of it, and it wouldn't be fully processed until Nier returned to his home studio, likely a few days' wait. Content that we did all that we could, we packed up ahead of the oncoming storm and picked a time and a place to meet for our day two session. On day two of our investigation, the storm had calmed the surface, but left black silt sustaining the sand near where the bones were once found. We set out with fresh sonar and drone footage, hoping calming water meant better dives. Instead, the scour hole pulled harder than before, limiting us just to a few descents beyond thirty feet. Back on shore, the silt told its own story. Heavy and staining, it carried up bits of metal and glass and fishing tackle, ordinary debris, yet all coated in the same black residue that once clung to the bones. But after finding a treasure trove of silt-stained objects, it was in the nearby shin deep water where we made the find of the trip. We're right back at the spot at the edge of the riprap, again, where the bones, I mean, we are within now ten yards of where the bones were found. Um again, you can see the silt. And I decided that around the riprap I might take a walk in the Shindeep water, and sure enough, to me, what appears like a severed bone, it grabbed my attention immediately. As well as a partner right next to it. This cut looks clean, like a clean cut to the bone. This bone not. So I don't know what this is. It is covered in silt. There is a stain black on here, if you look closely enough. And now we have another one. Exactly, uh almost exactly where the bones were found the first time. I wasn't convinced that what I had found in the water was human remains. But I wasn't convinced otherwise either. Knowing just how close these bones were to the 2016 and 2018 incidents, I felt obligated to call the local authorities. Next time, on The Beach Remains, I'm Ricky Conlin. The Beach Remains podcast is produced by Dream Oak Productions, all rights reserved, the song Gods and Ghosts performed by Koidog. Follow us on the Beach Remains Facebook page for show updates and fan community. Up ahead on the Beach Remains. And how would you describe the scene here? Just vibes.

SPEAKER_07 39:27

Probably encountered about six uh knots. I don't know if it's stones or it looks like a rock. That looks like a black rock.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

It does look human to you.

SPEAKER_06 39:37

Oh, it's absolutely human and no uncertain term.