What began as a hobby for two friends from Bloomfield has become a potential history lesson revealing decades-old secrets buried within the bodies of water in North Jersey.

Kevin Obiedzinski and Patrick Brown are magnet fishermen who have spent the past couple of months pulling all kinds of metal objects out of the waters of Essex County.

Most of the stuff is scrap metal. But the men have also found guns, a truck mirror, a bullet, fishing lures, a shotgun barrel, gym weights and more. The friends spend four to five hours every weekend day magnet fishing, Obiedzinski said.

“We’ve been pulling everything out of lakes and rivers that you could possibly imagine,” Obiedzinski, 43, said in an interview with NJ Advance Media on Wednesday. “It’s basically like fishing but with a magnet.”

On July 16, Obiedzinski and Brown pulled an unexploded military shell out of the Passaic River below the Lyndhurst Bridge. “The shell, believed to be live, was then secured and removed to a safe location to be detonated,” Nutley police said in a statement.

At first, Obiedzinski had no idea what the rusty, 25-to 30-pound object was or that the device could have exploded in their presence.

Magnet fishermen from Bloomfield found this unexploded artillery shell below the Lyndhurst Bridge in Bergen County on July 16.Photo courtesy of Kevin Obiedzinski

“I moved it with my hands. I carried it and the magnet stuck to it,” Obiedzinski said. “Who knew? It was covered with rust, so you couldn’t tell what it was, but it had the cylindrical shape of the shell.”

It wasn’t until police from Nutley, Lyndhurst and Belleville, along with a bomb squad and firefighters arrived to take the shell that Obiedzinski and Brown realized the significance of their find.

“After we processed the thought of what it was, we moved away from it,” Obiedzinski said. “We had no clue what it was before then.”

“Did we feel in danger initially? No. But afterwards when all the police cars and fire trucks started coming, when they confirmed that it was an artillery shell, that’s when our hearts started racing a little bit,” he said.

Police have not said where the device came from or how long it had been in the river. But Obiedzinski believes the shell may have been deposited in the river when Camp Nutley – an army base – was operating in the 1950s.

An ATM machine was among the objects two magnet fishermen found in bodies of water in Essex County recently.Photo courtesy of Kevin Obiedzinski

The unexploded shell was just the latest interesting find for the friends. On July 4, they found an ATM, along with six handguns, at the bottom of a lake in Branch Brook Park in Newark, Obiedzinski said.

“The initial handgun I pulled out was maybe in the water less than a week because there was no rust on it,” Obiedzinski said, adding that police surmised the ATM was taken in a robbery and dumped with the guns in the lake.

Obiedzinski said he became interested in magnet fishing after watching YouTube videos on the subject. Through a website, Obiedzinski purchased $300 to $400 worth of equipment to get him started in his hobby – including a 360-degree weighted magnet and 80- to 100-feet of rope.

The rope is tied to boat-docking cleats found on most bridges. Obiedzinski and Brown toss the rope and magnet into the river, wait for the magnet to sink and then wait for it to click onto a metal object. “Then we just drag it in,” Obiedzinski said.

“These magnets are strong. They can pick up upwards of 2,500 pounds if the magnet hits on the metal properly,” he said, noting that they are not able to pull up the heaviest of objects from the river on their own.

Most of what the men find is junk – scrap metal left behind by construction companies or lost items like fishing equipment. They pile up the junk on the side of the road and call a scrap metal collector who can take 500-600 pounds of scrap metal at a time to a recycling center.

Obiedzinski and Brown aren’t interested in selling the scrap metal themselves. “We don’t do it for the money. We do it for the hobby,” Obiedzinski said.

Firearms are among the finds at the bottom of the Passaic River and other bodies of water in North Jersey, according to magnet fisherman Kevin Obiedzinski.Photo courtesy of Kevin Obiedzinski

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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