He was only trying to help kids when he lost his cell phone in the water!
We were called to go recover a cell phone in 4 feet of water just outside of Gatineau Quebec. On Sunday morning a Kayaker was crossing the lake when he spotted kids in trouble. The kids had tipped their canoe. When he went to get back into his kayak his phone fell into the water. He knew exactly where it had fallen but it got covered up with silt and disappeared. He spent the next 3 hours searching for it but had to abandon the phone because a storm was approaching.
I met up with him at the lake and he rented a canoe to get us across. We arrived at this big slippery rock on the shoreline. He mentioned his phone had an orange case but it disappeared. I slowly got In the water and headed towards the area. The bottom was full of slippery boulders, branches, weeds and silt. As soon as you disturbed the bottom it turned dark brown with zero visibility. You had to reach down blind and feel between the webs of roots, boulders and rock crevasses.
I start swinging and within a few minutes, I had a “cell phone” signal. A very high and loud signal. Not expecting many signals there as it was in a remote area of the lake, I say “this must be it”. We took turns diving for it without success. We decided to get out and let the cloudy water clear up a bit. As it cleared we saw the orange phone in the bottom. We were pretty excited. He jumped in to retrieve it and came out with my hand held detector! Noo!! I lost it while diving for that signal. So back in we go and finally pull out the top of a pop can. We had chased a few more signals and by the end I’m in the canoe, paddling with one hand and swinging the detector with the other. Yes, this is possible to cover more ground and not disturb the bottom. After 2 hours of gridding the dirty bottom, I finally heard that signal we were searching for. He dove down and came up with an orange phone in his hand.
I’m soo happy he helped.. It was pretty hardcore and appreciated the team effort.
