Those who witnessed what happened to Tony’s dredge in that episode can attest to the fact that the $1 million machine was a golden investment.
“This dredge is the most efficient washer I’ve ever had,” Tony said on the show. “Dollar for dollar, cost per cubic meter, I’ll beat most of the big guys out there. They’ll never even come close.”
But the dredge was also a headache for Tony at times. Here are some of the ups and downs…
Dredging like Tony’s once dredged up 1 million ounces of gold in a single year.
As the narrator of Gold Rush recounts, Tony spent $1 million on a 75-year-old bucket gold dredge in 2014, hoping it would revolutionize his mining operation. “Every Viking needs a ship; that’s mine,” he said on the show.
And while that type of dredge hasn’t been used since the 1980s, it had an impressive track record. In 1939 alone, the narrator explained, the massive machines dredged up 1 million ounces of Klondike gold, worth $1.8 billion in today’s money.
Tony Beets moved his dredge “bar by bar, bolt by bolt” over six months.
In the episode, viewers watched Tony and his team spend six months moving the 350-ton machine to a new mine, disassembling it, and then reassembling it at the new location “bar by bolt,” as the narrator put it.
“Everybody thought I was crazy [and that] it couldn’t be done,” Tony said. “Well, that was it.”
Once the crew got the dredge up and running, it began processing 2,000 gallons of water per minute—and it did the work of a bulldozer, a digger, a rock truck, and an excavator.
By 2016, Tony was making 60 percent more profit from the dredge than he was making from other wash plants. And over five years, Tony had collected $7 million in gold from the dredge.
The dredge sank twice in six weeks.
As viewers witnessed last season, the dredge sank twice in a six-week period. In the second incident, fine sand blocked the manholes and spilled onto the floor below. And because the night crew had carelessly left the hatches on the floor open, sand and water flooded into the pontoons and partially sank the dredge.
“Tony invested a lot of money into this machine, and now it’s just sitting there looking like this, it’s not a proud moment,” one of his colleagues said at the time.
Luckily, the team managed to refloat the machine with groundwater and water from the reservoir, and they even managed to rotate the giant machine 90 degrees to continue their gold rush.
A stunt with the dredge landed Tony in trouble.
In April 2017, Tony appeared in Yukon Territorial Court for a stunt in which a former employee doused the dredge with gasoline and another employee set it on fire, according to CBC News. In Gold Rush, the narrator calls the stunt a “Viking baptism” to change the dredge’s fortunes.
In August of that year, Tony and his company were fined $31,000 for violating the Yukon Water Act in the incident, as Yukon News reported at the time.
“Since I’m the one running the show, I guess I should have been a little more stern and told him not to do that,” Beets said in April, according to CBC News. “But I didn’t do it, so you’re here in court, so accept the fine. Next time, don’t go there. This was a prank gone bad, right?”
