Do-good diver gives back
Cellphones, cameras and car keys returned to owners by man who scours Yk-area lake and riverbeds
Beth Brown
Northern News Services
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Becky Austin watched from her paddleboard as her friend's canoe lost a battle with some rapids and submerged in the Cameron River.
Diver Jeremy MacDonald has been recovering belongings lost beneath the waves, including Yellowknifer Becky Austin's beach bag and hard-to-replace set of car keys she lost in the Cameron River in July. - photo courtesy of Jeremy MacDonald |
The canoe recovered, but her car keys were not so fortunate. After 45 minutes of searching in the murky riverbed, Austin assumed her pricey Volkswagen key set was gone for good.
"We were exhausted because the current is quite strong there," said Austin.
That was the July long weekend.
Two weeks ago, she heard through a friend that her keys had shown up on a local Facebook page, Yellowknife's up-and-coming underwater lost-and-found group.
Diver Jeremy MacDonald has made it his mission to reunite people with their sunken belongings.
The hobbyist started his Good-Samaritan service this summer after finding some cellphones during a July dive. While electronics are ruined by the water, data like photos can still be retrieved from anything with a memory card.
"In typical Yellowknife fashion I pulled off a couple of pictures and said, 'Hey, anybody know these people? I found their phone,'" he said.
MacDonald has since started his own Facebook page, posting photos of his findings. He has around 560 followers and says the turnaround for people noticing their stuff can be as fast as a few hours.
MacDonald tries to return identifiable personal items like eye wear and cellphones. In the same dive that he found Austin's keys, he also recovered prescription lenses worth approximately $800 that have since been reunited with their owner.
"Things of a generic nature that have a value, like anchors, I just post those for sale on YK Classifieds," he said, adding the sales help pay for his relatively expensive hobby. He sells things like unidentified Ray-Bans, dog toys and fishing equipment - he has even found whole tackle boxes.
If people have specific search requests he just charges them for the cost of the air he uses during the dives.
He found Austin's key while searching the Cameron River for a lost camera. The key was in a blue beach bag, branded with the slogan "Seas The Day" - which later became Austin's skill-testing question to pick up her keys on Aug. 15.
"The bag was partially submerged in some sediment and the handles of the bag were caught on a junk camping chair," said MacDonald. This is likely why the keys hadn't been swept away by river currents.
The water was around 12 feet deep at the spot MacDonald made the discovery, he said.
These weren't just any old keys - Austin says replacing the set could have cost as much as $250, because of automatic features.
"If I have it in my purse I just put my hand up to the door and it unlocks," said Austin.
Besides swim trunks, bikini tops, an antique axe head and one .22 revolver, MacDonald says also he sees a lot of beer cans and bottles, especially near places where large-scale events are held, like Folk on the Rocks.
"The pollution aspect of it is sad," he said. "I'd like to get the city involved to do some underwater cleanups. In some places there is a ton of junk and debris."
He compared the pool area by the Cameron River near Camp Connections, where he found Austin's keys is comparable to diving in the Caribbean.
"That's a gorgeous area, being underwater when the light is hitting it. It's a calm area to dive, a ton of stuff to see," he said.
Unfortunately he sees a lot of garbage on the river bottom at that place too.
"NWT could make a number of spectacular diving sites for destination tourism," says MacDonald. "It's disheartening."
Local groups do organize shore cleanups on occasion, but underwater cleanups are not really a thing, and rivers and lakes are not self-cleansing the way an ocean would be.
"For most areas in the NWT, if you drop something in the water it's still there, (but) you can't see it," he says.
But he says there is humour in his findings too.
"You get a camera with videos on it and the last video is someone doing a back flip into the river before the camera falls into the water," he said.
He is currently planning to purchase an underwater metal detector so he can start helping people find lost wedding bands as well.
He added being familiar with the underwater landscape is a major asset.
"Down in Old Town it's very solid sediment on the bottom so stuff that is dropped tends to sit and eventually there will be an accumulation of sediment," he said, adding Long Lake's sediment layer is as deep as two feet before hitting solid ground.
"In Back Bay, it's a lot of clay sediment so things stay on top of the clay, but when there is a bit of wave action it
gets very murky very fast."
This familiarity proved especially helpful in an ongoing RCMP investigation he aided in as a diver, where he had the police turn off their boat motor and then he swam into the location.
"The propeller would have churned up all visibility," says MacDonald.
For specific searches he uses traditional search patterns with a compass and reel of thin rope, lacing the rope along the bottom he has already covered creating grids, spirals or zigzag patterns.
"I just go to a certain compass bearing and that tells me if I need to turn around," says MacDonald. "It's an adventure, you never know what you are going to find."
