Bering Sea Gold Returns Tonight!

Bering Sea Gold 2

 

I’m currently working on a profile of the father and daughter dynamic between Bering Sea Gold dredgers Steve and Emily Riedel (above) for our April issue. Until then, take a peek at tonight’s fourth season opener of the popular Discovery Channel show.

Here’s a sneak preview of my story, about Steve Riedel’s sometimes frustrating experiences when after suffering a serious shoulder injury he struggled to find riches in Nome:

Ironically, when Steve did make his life-altering decision, he swears he was never blinded by false promises, or prone to having unrealistic expectations. In other words: there was never the disillusioned sense of getting rich quickly, if ever.
But even still it hasn’t gone liked he even hoped it might, despite at the time it being “the fresh start” he craved.
“It had been a three-year ordeal, and so just before we came up it was at the end of the healing cycle, so I was feeling pretty good about my body. I really hadn’t been able to use my shoulder for three years,” he says. “It had been very depressing so I felt really good. I wanted to do something in did sort of fit in. I just wanted to get a real job. Of course, gold mining is probably the total opposite of a real job.”
But reality did set on the last season of Bering Sea Gold. He eventually got his own dredge, the Minnow, but he and his crew never got off the ground and mined just $11,000-plus worth of gold, one of the lowest totals in the third season.
“There are people who come up and dump $30-, $40-, $50,000 into an operation and they leave, sell everything off at 20 cents to a dollar. There are a lot of people up here like that,” he says.

Here’s the release from our good friends at Discovery, with a couple preview videos:

Photo by the Discovery Channel
Photo by the Discovery Channel

 

 

BERING SEA GOLD (409)

Friday, March 13 at 10 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel

Good Morning, Veit-Nome: The summer dredging season has officially kicked off in Nome, Alaska – ground zero of the great American gold rush. With warmer weather brings jam-packed claims, unexpected storms and rising tempers where gold fever is a family affair. With more competition and a short Alaskan summer, the miners battle treacherous conditions and each other in hopes of finding gold, and with the stakes greater than ever, it isn’t long before drama hits the Bering Sea. Captain Shawn Pomrenke is on the hunt for the series’ first-ever thousand ounce season, but his father Steve’s return to the Christine Rose causes their rocky relationship to turn explosive. And back for her second year as Captain of the Eroica, Alaska’s first and only female dredge owner Emily Reidel aims to fight her way back from financial ruin.