Searching for Underwater Treasure with Magnet Fishers
Magnet fisher James Kane cradles a shiny, four-pound magnetic disk: a stainless-steel shell housing an alloy of iron, neodymium and boron. He hucks it into a lake in a public park in New York City, then tugs it slowly toward shore with a sturdy synthetic rope. As the powerful magnet bump bump bumps along the bottom, it kicks up a line of bubbles—and then suddenly there’s a heavy drag, as if the lake bed has turned to taffy. The magnet is stuck to something. Filmed by his partner Barbi Agostini, Kane hoists their dripping catch: a thick iron rod called a sash weight, a counterbalance used to open heavy windows a century ago.
Over the next few hours on this October afternoon, Kane and Agostini also pull in a 20-year-old flip phone, a signpost, fishing hooks and lures, pliers, bottle caps, batteries and an iPhone 6. They give the smartphone to a girl who’s nearby with her friends, fishing for bluegills. “If it works, I’m going to be so happy!” she says. Then she sniffs the phone and wrinkles her nose. “It smells.”
To magnet fish is to plumb unseen depths for sunken treasure, but it also means getting acquainted with the stinky, the scummy and the bizarre. Agostini’s magnet once clanked onto the lid of a mason jar, inside which floated a dead tarantula in purple liquid. A particularly exciting catch can bring headlines—or the police. The American zeal for guns has sown firearms below the waterline, and magnet fishers harvest them with regularity. Agostini and Kane have found pistols, shotgun parts, Revolutionary War–era grapeshot and modern ammo clips. The two magnet fishers call the police whenever they find a gun, and they do so often enough that some officers recognize them. Last year Kane pulled an inert hand grenade out of New York City’s East River, summoning the police department’s bomb squad to a posh waterfront block in Queens. But the pair’s most notable catch—and probably the most famous thing ever found by U.S. magnet fishers, which Kane says has earned them a mention in an upcoming volume of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!—was a safe containing stacks of waterlogged cash, pulled from a river this past May.
